In Their End Is Our Beginning: the Henrys Tudor

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/the-henrys-tudor

Introit: Theme from The Tudors by Trevor Morris

Welcome to Between The Stools on 28^th January 2024.

This service is the culmination of a year of mostly British (I aptly wrote Brutish) mostly history, but I’ve had to hold this final sermon/vice in my head all along.

We have gone backwards in time, ending with the pair of first Tudor kings on the birthday of the first (Henry VII, 1457) and the death day of the second (Henry VIII, 1547). Note that the middle digits of those dates are reversed. Given the title of this service as well as chronology, usual logical sense would have begun here. But I’ve trusted that by beginning 2023 with the birthday of another king and choosing dates intuitively by month of events in historic people’s lives, especially anniversary years ending in zero, and dates that fell on a Sunday like today, that a progression would emerge.

The point was to always find a spiritual understanding in the stories of historic people, and their understanding of God (and how often flawed it was), trusting that as the year unfolded, we developed towards a better one.

2023 began with seemingly a non-fit, but I found a link between Job and Elvis that also was a kind of prologue to our theme. I concluded that Job’s understanding of God was an improvement on the prevailing ideology, but for me, still ill-(in) formed. From Patricia Cota Roble’s experience of him, I came to see Elvis – although human – as an embodiment of divine masculine, here for a special purpose which continues, not that the two recent movies would steer you to that conclusion. (Film is the theme of the rest of 2024’s services and so it features often today by way of segueway).

Job also set up the notion of finding favour with God…which we soon recognised in the 16^th C.

How do you please God and get him to help you? This implies that God isn’t minded to do so, and you must discern what he wants of you, making it an unequal game of guessing and transactions.

In February, we thought of one trying to live as and demonstrate the divine feminine – Mary Stuart.

I wished to begin the year with what we may wish to forge towards. Today’s title is a twist on Mary Queen of Scots’ saying: in my end is my beginning; or in Scots: En Ma Fin, Git Ma Commencement.

Then we had our Lent ladies. Katherine of Aragon and Mary I’s god was the old god, a god whom you suffered to placate and whom you made others suffer to turn back to. Some wives of Henry VIII (Jane, Anne of Cleves, perhaps Katherine Howard) seemed malleable and tactical in converting to or agreeing with what powerful others thought. Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr’s God took courage to believe in and involved reforming more than just faith, making this God dangerous. We thought of that more for our July Magdalene service with Jane Grey and Anne Askew.

Henry VIII and all his children thought that you needed firm guidance: the law and, for his protestant progeniture, a single unified prayer book and service. Henry hated extremists – a word we often hear today. Elizabeth wouldn’t ‘make windows into men’s souls’ but expected that you conformed to the church which she controlled on pain of punishment.

Thus we see that for those above, favour is through obedience, giving up, self harm; a God of divisions, where only one side – yours – is the right one.

We went back in time for a trio of special anniversaries, thinking of Julian of Norwich’s radical book, and Etheldreda of Ely who seemed to be more of the conventional way. We looked at Julian’s contemporary Margery Kempe who commendably lampooned the church and beliefs of her day; whereas Martin Luther did too, ‘his’ reformation wasn’t so far fetching. Like Job, for him, rightness with God was based around law, and although different to the status quo, faith following Luther remained hierarchical and established.

At JFK’s anniversary in November, we saw a man who changed, and a man who many think died for the change he wished to implement. We also saw that the Kennedys – a dynasty like the Tudors with an ongoing legacy – may be more complex and less admirable than overt popular opinion.

At Christmas, we considered long range biblical prophecies fulfilled. The Tudors were expecting a boy child – they actually got a female prince – but no-one of that family was a messiah or Christlike. Yet their history can be seen as an expected anointed promised child to lead them; the events of their reign were a watershed for faith and politics. And those events culminate today.

Prayer as we move into our main service.

Henry VII

In August, we thought of Richard III, with a famous play, two museums, and a film last year and a passionate society. Now we consider the other side of the coin. I’m not aware of a dramatised screen or stage adaptation of Henry VII’s life. “I’m the original Tudor,” he sang to an electrified lute, kicking be-breeched legs in York’s medieval Bar museum, trying to draw attention to an oft overlooked monarch. The TV adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s White Queen ended with the boy Henry becoming a man to take the throne in battle, egged on by his mother. Thus Henry was a passive pawn in this adaptation for Margaret Beaufort, the Red Queen, who exemplified the old kind of piety. She’s shown as a religious obsessive, who demands to God that things go her way, and cries at him when they seem not to. She is sure that she has heard that God will put her Welsh-born son on the throne of England.

I pause – is that sentiment true for us or anyone in our time? Is it true for ourselves…both about what we hear God tell us, and how we speak to him?

Margaret’s favour-currying is also about being seen to be outwardly pious, and that meant endowing 2 Cambridge colleges – Christ’s and St John’s. Her symbols of mythical yales and portcullis crown both gatehouses to this day. But being a founder and patron does not make you more holy – it’s lucrative and name-making. She was perhaps also trying to ensure that her soul went quickly to heaven. (We’ll be thinking of the inbetween period via a TV show soon).

Thus The White Queen ends with Henry VII becoming king and the start of the Tudor dynasty – but there’s little of what Henry himself was like. In exile for much of his life, the boy is groomed towards the throne and to the hand of Elizabeth of York, thus ending the Wars of the Roses by uniting the belligerent houses. But this misses the point of marriage and shows another corruption – that a legal contract was the way to create partnerships and heal the wounds of a divided nation.

The 2003 miniseries Henry VIII with Ray Winstone begins with his father is on his deathbed; he has few lines. He tells younger Henry to fulfil one wish: bear a son, literally imprinting on the heir apparent. It drives the whole story, yet we do not see the elder Henry again.

The Tudors TV show with Jonathan Rhys Meyers didn’t show Henry senior at all; despite the title, a generation was skipped. I do not recall the first Tudor in the various other Henry VIII screen offerings. Henry VII, along with his son Arthur, have usually left the world before these stories start.

So what have we missed?

When Henry VII is discussed, in documentaries and history sites, the focus is on 3 questions:

1) Did he have a right to the throne?

2) Were his policies shrewd?

3) What were his battle techniques at Bosworth Field, where he killed Richard III?

These are not matters that I wish to take on in any detail here, for my focus is always spiritual. But, in passing:

It’s often pointed out that Margaret’s claim to the throne (let’s be honest, it was Lady Beaufort’s) was stupendous: several would have to die (they did) before Henry Tudor, son of Edmund son of Owen, could become king. The Tudor claim is tenuous, for there were living Plantagents. Taking the throne in battle is very old style – cf Macbeth of four centuries earlier. Now it was supposed to be passed by birth…except where there’s leeway and interpretation in the family tree.

Either way, the populace had no say in who their sovereign ruler was, except to deny popular support.

I am told by David Starkey and Thomas Penn that what Henry VII did when he failed to gain support created him a tyrant. The latter calls the reign and man ‘dark and chilling…England’s most sinister monarch’. Henry held fines over his subjects, huge unpayable fines that he didn’t even call in….he just liked the power that the threat hanging over them gave. He mostly convened parliament to up taxes for war. He made his second son a recluse who couldn’t be accessed, save by his father’s permission. He abused the law unlawfully, taking power and autonomy and dissent away.

Henry VII is named as paranoid, miserly, and the starter of the longrunning and effective Tudor propaganda machine, creating Richard III as hateful and hideous – and parading him dead and naked through Leicester, dumping his body in a church not fit for a king; he got rid of as many of who might claim his throne as he could (Henry VIII finished off the rest, such as Buckingham). It’s also thought that it’s he who dispatched the Princes In The Tower – they would have been equally inconvenient to Henry as to Richard – but blamed it on the outgoing king.

We could say that cruelty and tyranny ran in the family.

I also see that Henry’s style of controlling his subjects is much like the mediaeval church’s way on behalf of God. It’s a theology that’s continued in some circles; this time, the fine is eternal damnation, and the debt is of sin and gratitude for God’s mercy through Christ’s passion.

I am not aware of anything that commends Henry VII, even if his dynastic marriage was happy.

I can say that this was not how to lead; and it’s a style that, as we see a new world emerging, needs never to return.

Music – I shall reveal what in a minute

Henry VIII

I’ve had my head with Nessie and I thought: not such a switch – I’m still with monsters.

Henry VIII has become one of the people that I most hate in history, one of the most cruel and evil people I can think of.

I have long wondered why he wasn’t murdered. Surely he was more worthy of execution for treason against the people than Charles I? Surely someone would rise up and finish the man, in battle by assassination? He nearly died in jousting – why was he allowed to recover? He had chronic poor health – why did that not claim him earlier? But he reigned for nearly 40 years, crushing the attempts to overthrow him, turning on those once beloved and close.

I did find some satisfaction in the discovery of what happened to his huge smelling corpse. It was laid at Syon House. This country stately home was where 5^th wife Katherine Howard – the teen he could have fathered twice – was imprisoned before her execution. This former priory witnessed another gory death on Henry’s whim as a monk the abbot refused to capitulate at the dissolution, and his remains were hung over the door as a warning to other recalcitrants. Henry’s body rested overnight at his palace (another he snatched, making around 60 – more than any other monarch) on the way to being buried at Windsor castle. (Note that although he’d been laid at state in Westminster, that he didn’t join his father in his fancy mausoleum in the national abbey and lie where his children would, but next to his supposed favourite wife and lifelong friend in a private chapel). Fittingly like Queen Jezebel of the Old Testament, Henry burst open under his own puss-y, gassy weight and was licked by dogs!

Even if apocryphal – please God, let it be true! – it shows a popular wish that this wicked man, who executed 72,000 (often for exercising freedom of conscience) got some deserts on this earthly plain.

I saw Henry VIII as an easy candidate for the hell that I don’t usually now believe in. Surely this kind of tyrant deserves eternal punishment…or at least, being annihilated, or held in a phantom zone (like the villains in Superman we’ll meet in Dec) far from God, and the rest of us enjoying Heaven.

But as I considered Henry VIII, I felt God say: he’s with me. (Did I hear right, Lord?) Surely not, I said. This is not the kind of person I wish to spend eternity with. Neale Donald Walsch said in his Conversations With God that Hitler was in heaven. That was staggering. I see Bluff King Hal on a par. I will say that Neale’s extraordinary statement needs some unpacking and justifying, but it’s a single line after about 20 pages about what hell is not. God has no need or reason to continually harm us in the next world. I thought that he went on (in another book) to explain that Hitler fulfilled some kind of purpose and soul contract, which still doesn’t sit well with me and it certainly does not excuse nor absolve.

What purpose can Henry have served?

As an ecumenical nonconformist, I don’t even see that he brought in the true faith. It can’t be very true if he did so much harm to others who didn’t share it. He was, rather perversely, a lifelong Catholic, just preferring his own head at the top to the Pope’s. His act of 1539 made his stance clear. The reformation was about getting Henry what he wanted – power and a woman.

The 1972 Keith Michell film has Henry not reply to the priest’s final question: do you die in faith?

Did he truly have one?

Henry’s behaviour seems far from what we’d consider as Christian…abuse of every kind, every major sin…

So what could garner Henry an eternal reward other than the great lake of fire?

I realise that this view is common but not universal.

I also realise that my wish says something about me – a need for comeuppance and a belief in punishment.

The tagline for the 2000s TV series The Tudors by Michael Hirst said: ‘it’s great to be king’. Rather than seeing Henry VIII as a disgusting man – note no king has yet used that name again since – they wanted to explore what you’d do with all that power. I know that some people do admire and kind of like him, and yet, seeing him on the par that I do, I cannot understand it, and found it alarming.

However, I was reminded/informed of three facets about Henry. One, that he was a musician; you just heard his greatest hits, as selected and brought to you by Historic Royal Palaces, who care for his most famous home – Hampton Court. (I do rather like his building tastes, as much as I judge his elitist opulence). I listened to a longer collection of his songs and noted that they all seemed secular. (Can anyone find me a religious song?). Whether you personally are touched by and impressed by this music, I will note that he was a composer and musician, and that may suggest some taste and sensitivity; and that my opinion of it has been jaded by others (Joanna Denny, Anne of The 1000 Days).

Second was a surprise: Henry’s Herbalist Charter. In over 20 years of Tudor interest, and as many in alternative medicine, this has not come to my attention before. When seeking proof (I do like to back things up), I was struck by a further two things. One was that some sites ignored Henry’s support of herbalists and that he allegedly created the need for being licensed and the Royal College of Physicians, making medicine about science and not superstition. Secondly, that this Herbalists’ Charter is also known as the Quacks’ Charter and that serious sounding sites call it thus. But what the herbalists say is that Henry VIII protected them, to this day. The charter states that some are abusing the courts to stop other genuine healers from practising – still true. This is forbidden and the right to use medicinal herbs is preserved, without needing permission of others (like those physicians et al.) Henry had plenty of need of medicine and it seems that he was interested in herbs, and had done something for the plebs – motive unclear. I was told it was a sign that he cared about the people; another said that the peasants weren’t getting medical care and thus were unable to work and this affected the country’s food supply. But the charter was a different facet of this man.

The third was recalling Ray Winstone’s portrayal; my response and what Ray said on the DVD extras. Ray is my favourite Henry, and he alone has allowed me to feel pity, and at least once, to cry for him. I felt for his wrangling over biblical verses that seemed to condemn him; and sometimes that he was frustrated, unloved, betrayed, manipulated and lonely. (Ha! I want to say). Ray saw Henry as complex; like Michael Hirst’s earlier essay on the British Borgias Elizabeth (1998), they began with ‘the man’ [Cockney voice] and worked outwards. Ray said that his playing a historic king wasn’t out of character for one we’re used to seeing in gangster roles, for Ray’s Henry is a gangster (mine too). The difference, quoth Ray, is that the king makes the rules, whilst gangsters break them. But this miniseries penned by Peter Morgan recalls that Henry can be fascinating because he’s this multifaceted mix of a monarch. It seems that this is a draw for those who study him, who like to consider the question: how did a good king turn so rotten?

It’s not a question that I’m going to consider tonight, although I will just query the supposition that Henry started well.

I might want to posit, but not answer: is anyone bad to the core and beyond saving?

Is there any aspect of Henry’s life which we might show compassion for?

I also recall surprising myself that I considered the notion that Henry and Anne Boleyn may have been twin flames, and a parallel with a more modern royal with a similar name and look…

I would like to shift into the notion of soul contracts and growth.

Henry seemed to live out various marital permutations and soul contracts – in one lifetime!

What was he trying to achieve?

I want to sit with that…think of what I summarised from my Lent reflections about the relationship with each wife and the kind of God they believed in.

Henry VIII is for me the embodiment of the worst in men: something he shares with Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. (You’ll be unsurprised to know that I subverted that novel as part of my own…might Henry be up next?). I wrote an essay for my MA: Jane Eyre as Spiritual Autobiography. I realised that the real person developing, especially spiritually in Bronte’s novel, is Rochester. What is Henry’s development – is it downhill? Was there a wrinkle upwards during Anne Boleyn? And the Herbalist’s Charter?

What was he the catalyst of?

I wondered what Henry’s reign shows about kingship, spiritual and temporal:

No other gods before me

A God to placate with terms of his making, sometimes arcane and also capricious

A God who will bestow favour if he’s minded, by serving him (in the bedroom or battle field)

A God who hangs fear of punishment and unpayable debt over you – like Henry VII

A God who values gifts and flattery

A God who values conformity

A God who will have no rivals – How like Herod those Henrys were (it’s Magi season)

A God with a massive ego that needs stoking constantly

A God who knows little about real love

A God who’s a distant parent, and who can change who his favourite is

A God who’s basically misogynistic

A God who has a clear hierarchy – only the select get access to his inner chamber

Like Job’s God, Henry’s God can take and give immediately, no appeal

Henry’s a man who assumes his divine right to rule and his extra closeness to God by birthright

This is all far from who I consider the real God; this feels like an undergod, falsely taking the role and hiding behind a curtain with a megaphone (we might be thinking about that film this year).

As we come close to the Chinese new year as well as the Between The Stools new year, I would like to think of the world as coming towards the end of its hitherto tyranny and inequality. The massive breakdown continues. I hope that we see both these Henrys as leaders we want no more of, on any level. I hope we’re moving – like JF Kennedy allegedly did – away from the hawkish warmongering and creation of superpowers to a different kind of power. Henry VIII attempted a peace treaty with a long term adversary. Let us see more of that as a solution, instead of violence and landgrabbing. Let us not admire ruthlessness or see it as a necessity to survive.

I’ve two brief points to make before rounding off with some music and closing remarks.

One, is that I see this time as the end of defining our relationship with God in legal terms. It was there in early Old Testament Job, in Paul’s New Testament writings, and it is still there at the Reformation. I am still working on a law piece, but I see that writ has hitherto had too much power and is about abusing power. God is not interested in the kind of legally guilt-free ‘righteousness’ that can be credited to us like components towards a certificate. God is not impressed by the size of your army, your palace, your treasury. He’s not interested in prowess and jewels. And he’s not interested in your attempts at immortality (as per Lord Mountjoy quote early in Henry VIII’s reign) and bartering for a better deal posthumously.

God does not lead a world rooted in fear, like the Tudors. He doesn’t want your allegiance on pain of punishment or being legally owned or beholden. His gift is not about birthright, nor something that can be snatched in battle nor the stroke of a sneaky lawyer’s pen.

So finally: what could Henry’s role – both of them – have been? Were they pawns of higher darker forces? What did they help shape? What might their soul contract have been? What was their destiny? What was their role in the overall human journey?

I wonder if they completed what their souls set out to. We can learn from them how not to be.

They may have begun the modern era, the English Renaissance, but what did they really birth?

On the cusp of another such time, what can we birth instead?

Whilst you ponder, I’m going to play some music, which are both special favourites of mine. It may surprise, for it’s clearly a pair of pieces that are anachronistic to these 15^th and 16^th century men, yet these close two films about the Tudors. They were first used at the end of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, and the Winstone Henry VIII followed suit. Bookending with his own deathbed, the TV show tried to show that Henry had learned something since his father’s death 38 years earlier. His last words to his son and heir were not what he had hotheadedly promised his own father; not about the battlefield glory of his namesake (Henry V), not about full coffers and firm rule… I don’t know that the real Henry VIII had learned any of this. but I like to think that a modern audience wants Henry to have made some kind of positive progress.

Nimrod by Elgar is about a briefly mentioned mighty hunter in Genesis – perhaps the Tudors would like to consider themselves as such. However, Nimrod is also connected to the Illuminati and the beginning of a corrupt world that needed salvation.

The last piece is the introit to Mozart’s Requiem. And this is a requiem to our History year – might we have another some time? – and to this British brutish family that ended in March 1603, to the religious persecution and ‘accept my rule and beliefs or die’ that sadly did not end with them. I hope too that it is a requiem to a world of fear, violence, inequality, misogyny and abuse, of territorial grabbing and acquisition, persons who don’t know how to feel or say sorry or that they are wrong.

I make no apology for the lack of historical sources in this – I also have a requiem for putting empiricism and academia before all else. The film mentions are meant to lead into our new year, and bookend what I said last February and beyond about modes of knowing and real truth.

Do let me know what you thought of the History Year and I may be open to suggestion about films for this year. I’m curating a list. You’ll be hearing from me in Lent, but we’ll definitely meet on Easter Sunday which is the 31^st March, and a special film anniversary. (It’s clock change time).

I send blessings to you all as we enter a new era. Do reach out to me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Here are Elgar and Mozart. Thank you for joining me. Good night!

(Further dates and themes to be posted anon – I’m in a time of flux)

JFK 60: Walking Into Your Destiny II

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/jfk60

Welcome to Between The Stools on 26th November 2023. This is part II of Walking Into Your Destiny. (Part I was last week). I felt the need to link the Tudor changeover of 17th (Mary to Elizabeth) with the 60 year anniversary of John F Kennedy’s death on 22nd – the only time in our History Year that we’ve left the continent of Europe and come into living memory. In January, on the cusp of the History Year (which runs until next January) we thought of Elvis; we also spent two services of 2022 with Diana and Lennon. I see these as connected with today’s focus.

I set up the theme of destiny in our September service, although it’s been tacitly there all along. With today’s subject, we might see destiny in two ways: his presidency and his violent end. In contrast, Elizabeth I of England took the baton from her ill sister to reign for 45 years that are known as glorious; she lived to 70, which was considered then a long life, and she died of natural causes – unlike nearly all Kennedys since the middle of the last century. Yet there is not such a leap from 1558 to 1958. In both, there is dynasty building, empire building, an attempts at world domination, establishing a new era, at vanquishing an equal but opposite rival, and a fearful rhetoric to gain support for its brutal suppression. I’d like to think there’s a 3rd way of destiny.

“Of course I’ve heard of JFK. When was he on the throne again?”

This is a true quote, apparently said in innocence (although I suspect razor sharp concealed wit) from a British co-worker a few years back. I actually think that, whether the joke was on her colleagues or accidental, there is insight here. America does have a throne – on a four year basis with a much publicized contest, a game of thrones. This particular throne holder was especially given the royal treatment, before and after his death. Did he want more thrones under his, to be a high king? As I’ve written this, my focus and opinion has changed. Jack Kennedy has been oft rendered a godlike status – he even has a mountain named for him! – but this will not be a hagiography. Nor will it be primarily a biography – analyses of rifle trajectories and head wounds will not form a part of this service: as ever, I’m seeking spiritual insight. To my US audience, I want to warn that I may critique things that you hold dear. Please know that I do so with love and respect for you as individuals, especially those I know personally as spiritual brothers and sisters. And I’ve been as willing to critique my own country and its tenets and golden geese.

So with those caveats, let us begin….
with a few moments of silence and a prayer

Part I

This sermon was read with a 1960s pillbox hat, such as Jackie Kennedy was wearing 60 years ago

It occurs to me that true facts are rare. Quiz answers are usually a single word or name, but they can reflect the quizmaster’s beliefs and understanding as much as any real, uncontested truth. That is so for the story of JFK.

Yes, F stags for Fitzgerald; John was born on 29th May 1917; he was the second of nine children; his father Joseph, who served as the American ambassador in Britain, was from an Irish immigrant Catholic family; they initially lived in Brookline, outside Boston; his mother Rosemary lived to 104; his four brothers all ran for president; John was enrolled at the London School of Economics… then ill health soon terminated John’s studies. After another brief enrolment, Jack eventually went to Harvard and into the navy in the war. It seems that Jack’s time in England was significant and he published his first book – or rather, his father did for him – called “Why England Slept” which was his honours thesis on WWII and appeasement. It naturally did well because of the promotion and standing of the author’s millionaire father.

Yes, his wife was Jacqueline Bouvier, who later married Aristotle Onassis. Jack and Jackie had two children, John and Caroline (more died at birth). JFK was elected president in 1960, serving from the next year. He did not live to see the end of his four year term. The phrase ‘Bay of Pigs’ will occur in a quiz, but what he was responsible for and what to call that Cuban military event (was it a fiasco?) is not without contention. Nor are his policies. I wonder how well known NMAS 263 is. I bet you wouldn’t be asked to name Executive Order 11110 (it’s not in Wikipedia). I discovered it on 11.11 this year. I will come back to these, as they may be key to what happened on 22.11.

Note that his day of death is twice that of the month of his death.

A general knowledge question might ask who killed JFK. The standard answer is LHO – Lee Harvey Oswald. I would substitute other initials.

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe that any death of a celebrity by a lone gunman is ever the truth. I state this of Jill Dando, John Lennon, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. I wonder if suicides and sudden accidents or fast track terminal illnesses really were the cause of the demise of many others, and in that I include Princess Diana, Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe. Whenever someone dies after speaking out – Ulrich Mühe, who had a career of acting in films that challenged political narratives, such as The Lives of Others; Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy (The Girl Who/With…) – I felt, as others clearly state, including the partner of the latter, that this was assassination. Like the others I’ve just mentioned, there was a reason to kill not just one Kennedy, and I think it’s important to see such incidents as a group.

All the above were set to expose or transpose the establishment.

(Jill Dando was a British TV presenter about to reveal the abuse of BBC children’s presenter Jimmy Saville; Stieg had a similar reveal on Swedish authorities)

Note how fast JFK was buried: 3 days later. Bear in mind that he died on a Friday. (Hence the 60th anniversary was yesterday, 25th Nov)

Like Anne Boleyn, he’d been in office 1000 days (1036 to be precise)

How many Kennedys have died in violent or suspicious circs? Arguably up to 14, the last being in 2020, if you add the cruel psychiatric treatment of John’s eldest sister Rose Marie – put away by her father against her will and knowledge, and not found by her siblings for decades.

I believe(d) that the Kennedys had and have important work to do. It is why I chose them today.

Simone Simons begins her memoir of Diana with a scoop. It was a tawdry attempt at attention grabbing – the shocker with her late father in law and the threats she received was of far more interest and moment. But I believe(d) that Diana’s brief dalliance with JFK’s son connected those families and their analogous missions, just as she was likened to Marilyn Monroe (with whom she shared a eulogy in song by Elton John – Candle In the Wind) who was Jack’s longterm lover. John Jnr died in an aircraft incident two years after Diana.

I think – or hoped – that Jack Kennedy was to do in the US what Diana had begun in the UK. Both had the potential to reach far wider than their own countries.

I saw this mission as more than that explicitly stated in JFK’s inaugural speech, which closed: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

It was studying that speech that began to make me turn my opinion.

Note how often he speaks of pledges. Is this repeated ‘we’ the American people, ‘his’ administration, or is JFK using the royal we?! He rarely uses ‘I’.

That famed address of January 20th 1961 is not a treatise on how he John Kennedy will serve the American people, mindful of other nations, but it’s a statement of globalisation, headed by him. His ‘liberty’ is a cipher for the brand he pedalled – a system run by corporations that they package as ‘democracy’.

I didn’t like his ‘ask not what this country will do for you but ask what you can do for your country’ which makes responsibility not his and ‘his’ government’s, but pings it back onto the people. We might question – which he did not – the notion of nation and government, under which most of us are forced to live and to pay on pain of punishment. His 1347 words, crafted by himself and his speech writer Ted Sorensen, oft address other countries, and try to create America the police and leaders of world, and make all nations promise to him; like a global christening ceremony, all are godparents whether they chose and are willing to be. Like Old Testament Joseph, he dreams that all sheaves bow to his central gathered corn.

Compare this oration with Elizabeth’s address to the troops at Tilbury before the Armada. I first found Kennedy’s speech in the same book.

From there, I became angrier at the Kennedys and went on a snaking journey towards a very different treatment today, far from my original reason to choose him, which I’ll explain in part 2.

What brought back my hope and interest was one of Jack Kennedy’s last speeches, that of June 10th* in his final year. In two years, he had changed from haughty hawk to diplomatic dove. (Today’s sermon is the same length as that speech)

I’m going to lead you into a pause to and then I’ll give a second part of my address. I’m going to play you some solfeggio music which makes me think of walking into destiny, as we thought of with Elizabeth I last week. It’s very cosmic sounding and I want us to think what Jack Kennedy’s cosmic role might have been…and on our own.

Music from solfeggiotones.com Body Healing Tones 1565hz

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Part II

As I’ve stated before, I’m very interested in how things are presented in the mainstream – my research degree focussed on this regarding the Tudors. Hence I turned my lens onto those pointed at JFK and his family. There are many books – yes even a British bookshop will probably carry a tome on the Kennedys – and films and documentaries are plentiful and easily found.

The depictions of JFK are especially important as they can lead on how Americans see themselves, and outsiders see America; the credibility of the media, law and enforcement, and those secret ‘services’…and the notion of nationhood and government. I watched many: I comment here on a selection.

I wasn’t sure what kind of account I’d get in the 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK. At a swaggering 3½ hours, I was quickly disillusioned that it wasn’t going to feature Jack Kennedy…in fact no-one close to Kennedy is anything but a distant grainy face in a newsreel. The chief actors played the New Orleans District Attorney Garrison and his team, and suspects. So much about JFK seems to focus on his death and its apparent mystery but I wanted to know about his life and what he might have done that made him a threat and target. I was already sure in general terms of who.

The movie JFK does say that late on that people ask – including the film’s current audience – who and how but not why. And it’s the why that matters.

I was impressed by Oliver Stone’s bravery and that of all the cast and crew, and that a mainstream Hollywood studio – Warner Brothers – made this well known film. For it clearly calls out that official 3 bullet lone gunman theory, and posits that the establishment themselves – the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the system of law and order – all conspired to kill a serving president in a coup d’etat.

Oliver Stone has made several brave films (such as Snowden), and his commentary of JFK makes clear his deep research and commitment to this subject, which he twice returned to. He also personally interviewed Fidel Castro, who is essential for us to understand the other point of view and decisions facing Kennedy. (These are available as documentaries).

Ten years later, Kevin Costner again took a leading role in a film about JFK. Thirteen Days is about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which despite being Top Gun meets West Wing, did bring some nuance and complexity. I note its year: 2001, that of the Twin Towers. I also note that period was the run up to a new round of war, terrorism-seeking and a common enemy: now not communism, but Islam. The premise of weapons of mass destruction again underpinned military action in a watershed moment. America is shown – whether intentionally or not – to be an arrogant aggressor, demanding another sovereign nation to submit to it. I noted that whereas the USSR was demanded to remove its missiles from Cuba, it was unthinkable for the USA to remove theirs from Turkey (they were 6 months later). The film ceded that the peace found with Russia was “a victory for them as much as us.”

A documentary on Amazon Prime “JFK X – solving the crime of the century” (2023) says that was a staged death (with film special effect squibs to explode blood) and that he retired from public view. It was unclear as to why – to avoid the hand of the mob, or to be with a lover? It tried to undercut Oliver Stone’s film, but the years later commentary convinced me that the idea that Stone had realised this truth but felt he had to go ahead with his script had no basis.

A perspective on Marilyn (Mary – lin) Monroe, especially that offered in “The Mystery of Marilyn Munroe: the unheard tapes” (2022) shows both best known brothers to be serial adulterers and women users. I do not doubt that JFK had an affair with Marilyn, and it was clearly stated and offered proof that RFK did too – simultaneously. I no longer see the playboy epithet as unjust or even opinion – it is fact. I also see that Marilyn’s death was connected to the Kennedys: if they didn’t kill her, they lied about events to stop their duel relationship with her becoming public. The FBI was despatched to her deathbed suspiciously quickly and evidence disposed of.

I’m angry and shocked by the film Blonde (2022), which purports to be fiction but is based on real people. I found its intense unrelenting misery, missing Marilyn’s achievements, both unwatchable and unrepresentative. The scenes around ‘The President’ caused another writer to dub JFK a ‘monster’. But no evidence by the filmmaker or author of the book he adapted was offered to justify this. The gruelling marathon of surreal imagery could have worked in two negative ways: to denigrate the memory of Jack Kennedy, and remove suspicion in Marilyn’s death. Her alleged communism and knowledge of missile tests were removed. (Note what I quoted about her earthly role in my Diana service).

As I researched, I heard of ‘dirty’ campaigns and that money allowed pushy promotions and cheesy but popular jingles to push Jack to the American throne. I tired of being told that Jack was goodlooking – not in my view – he embodied all I associate and dislike regarding America.

I wasn’t sure if JFK and his family weren’t killed by the mob and the Illuminati or part of it; was the string of deaths a series of honour killings?

It did occur that Jack Kennedy was a Saul and Khal Drogo kind of leader. In the Old Testament, Israel asked for a king to be like other nations. God gave them one of worldly standard – tall and athletic and handsome. It’s generally considered that this leader was not a success.

Kahl Drogo of Game of Thrones, played in the TV series by Jason Mamoa, is a Saul-like leader, and in some ways, Kennedy-like. No, not in being 6’5 and well built – Jack was skinny and suffered secretly from Addison’s disease, giving him in pain and physical struggle. Like Khal, he seemed to fear letting his people know about physical weakness. JFK was different from leaders of yore who went into battle with their troops, not being the person with the best escape and protection. In Biblical times, and Tudor times, one faced your battle foe corporally – in Kennedy’s time as now, warfare is possible from a distance, on a screen, not experiencing the horror of those you strike. But Kennedy is popular because he was handsome, rich and charming with a nice wife, I’m repeatedly told. He could rally people, but that is not the same as delivering to them.

It was pointed out – and I’d seen it myself – that Kennedy is accused of many of the things that Trump is: sexual abuse, being rich; their speeches had some similarities – an arrogant belief in their country and their own place in it. During his presidential campaigns in 1960, Kennedy said that you are voting for the most important individual in the free world, ie. him. What is this freedom? Trump is a divisive figure – a broad range of people hate him, but Kennedy comes to us as a popular and good leader whose speeches are listed in special categories. Is that fair?
(Of course those opinions are also reversed).

I do see – or hoped to – a more positive link, as those who stand up to the establishment they were meant to head.

Whatever Jack Kennedy was and even became, I see his leadership style as OLD style – competition and hierarchy (being president and winning the space race), about greatness due to military power and material wealth. It’s about wheeling deals and managing how you’re seen and what is known. It’s a perpetual precarious game of cards.

I think the time is here for new leaders and a new political world.

I had seen that Jack Kennedy’s work was on a greater spiritual level, aided by the fact that channellings in his name have been published, and that these began during the coronavirus period, which was significant, encouraging readers in the ongoing fight against good and evil. Whether or not one accepts these channels by Losha as from Jack, it is interesting that this person was used during these trials. Kennedy explicitly likened and linked his mission with that of Diana.

I want to almost round off with mention of the Kennedy reign being called Camelot. I’d like to direct you to my thoughts on the film First Knight. Yes, Jackie and Jack were a golden couple, like Arthur and Guinevere, ruling over a mythical leading kingdom in fairness, enjoying the love of his people. But William Nicholson’s Arthur is called a tyrant. He’s flawed. I spoke of how the Disney style castle of the film may be a deliberate nod to the American dream, and how the values and ideals – and being built on an ideal – are true of both Authurian kingdom (as penned by Nicholson) and the administration of Kennedy, or let’s be honest: kingdom.

Lastly, I bring back that security memo and Executive Order. It’s speculated that along with the University speech of June ‘63, that these are what got Kennedy killed. The order stated that American money would be henceforth backed with silver and thus move away from the Federal Reserve. The NSAM stated that 1000 troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam, but it also clearly said that the new government there would be monitored and encouraged to develop along approved lines. I’m not sure if that university speech in Washington did call for total nuclear disarmament as some state, or if JFK did vow to ‘splinter’ and wind down the CIA (but he did plan to continue covert ops, according to the document I saw)…but here is what I do take from Jack Kennedy:

that we want him to have, and this is what impresses those who like him. We want an end to imperialist wars, of elites controlling our finances. We want people who negotiate for peace rather than bomb and shoot their demands. We want a flaming torch – like that on Kennedy’s grave – to be passed along the decades and across the lands that fights evil and brings in a new better world. Kennedy ceded that it wouldn’t be complete in his lifetime, but I would like to think that 60 years on, it is possible in ours…and not be forever passing the torch into a distant future. Nor do I think that torch is for conventionally recognised leaders alone. There have been dramatic shifts in recent decades, and indeed, very recent years. The time is coming and is now here when the world of Kennedy’s 6/6* speech is not swallowed by 666 but is coming into being. *(The University speech is dated 6th June but was delivered on 10th).

Our next meeting is on Christmas eve (8pm), with a medieval musical theme

Elspeth at betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

“This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes”

Nov 19^th 2023

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/this-is-the-lords-doing-and-it-is-marvellous-in-our-eyes

Between The Stools in latter November is a split service: this is part 1

Please watch this video (under 2 mins) https://www.brighteon.com/channels/elspethr

https://www.brighteon.com/cb23e254-d594-4894-9bce-8cce09b7c020

On Friday, 465 years ago, one Tudor queen gave way to another. And I think tht is literally what happened: that without speaking or being near each other, on a spiritual level, these often rival half sisters passed over the baton. In Elizabeth (1998), you see the baton – the royal ring – being taken off the dead old queen, Mary I, and (rather reluctantly in this telling) being instructed to give it to the new. Princess Elizabeth was on house arrest at Hatfield, and the man who comes with the ring – the Earl of Sussex – is the same one who arrested her and took her to the Tower at Mary’s behest. Last time, Elizabeth feared for her life; now she knows that what she was born to do begins.

Shekhar Kapur says in his director’s commentary that this moment, of being taken by her hand by her ladies to the great oak where the queen’s men await, is Elizabeth walking into her destiny. Destiny is a key theme for this Hindu filmmaker. Twice in this scene the screen turns white, the first as Elizabeth walks out of the door into brilliant sunshine that engulfs the woman that would be known as the sun. For Shekhar, that blanched brilliance symbolises the unknown of our future – which could be seen as a contradiction to his destiny concept. He shoots in almost silence – just the sound of birds as an appetiser antiphon, before the human choirs of Westminster abbey kick in. (I added the soundtrack of the same scene from the 2005 BBC miniseries to the video). Elizabeth is said to have said – and always does in films – “This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes”. It is a part quote from Psalm 118. It begins “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cap (or corner) stone.” (v22-23). Elizabeth doesn’t say the first part, but it is denoted by the second sentence, almost as if the first part is tacit. These words were also quoted by Jesus in Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10-11 and Luke 20:17 – note that three gospels thought it worth including. This unattributed psalm of past woes and thankful praise is thought to pertain to a ruler who was passed over to become the founding key stone that holds up something great. Elizabeth, the on/off bastard or heir to the throne, was perhaps the greatest of her House, but she was also the end of that dynasty and of rulers of England alone. Was she speaking of her own projected legacy, or that Britain would be united on her death and an empire would begin? (I am not impressed by the empire). Did she already feel that she would be Gloriana and the woman of the Rainbow portrait, that would hang at the site?

It is her first use of the royal we: “it is marvellous in our eyes”. Already she believes that God and her speak as one.

It doesn’t feel very modest to use that psalm, especially knowing that Jesus used it. The chapter in in gospels begins with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem – the holy city of temporal and spiritual power (just as Elizabeth as queen would be). The preceding section is headed “The authority of Jesus questioned” – does that suggest that Elizabeth nods to her own divine authority? The quote comes in a parable, that of the tenants. It seems to be saying that Gentiles will be included in the kingdom. I am concerned to describe the other part of that amulet as there is a heightened sensitivity around all things Israel, but it seems to be and is taken as a parable against his hearers, the priests and rulers. It actually doesn’t seem to apply to Jesus himself, and seems (with the ensuing comment) to be a threat against those who don’t believe in him. That and the violence of the smashing stones analogy is not something I’m comfortable with.

So what was Elizabeth thinking? And what was Jesus thinking?

I’m shortly going to let you think on that, but I’d like to point out another aspect of this story of Elizabeth – even if it is a fable. it is the presence of the tree. The tree was allegedly still standing in my lifetime, but when I last visited Hatfield, it had been replaced by a young tree planted by the late Elizabeth II. There is a baton handing in that, a continuity. I wish us to briefly think of trees, which, as I said of cathedrals in Sept, can be hundreds of years before us and endure hundred of years after us. I think that Shekhar makes that explicit when he uses long shots where the tree is the most prominent feature in the frame and Elizabeth is tiny beside it. There are many such trees at Hatfield still and we often gravitate towards special trees, especially oak, their size and longevity denoting wisdom and strength. Trees have been and still are worshipped as sacred and are healing and essential to life. I wonder why Jesus didn’t liken himself to a tree?

This must’ve felt like Joseph (of Genesis) moment. Still from Elizabeth (1998)

So I’m going to offer you to mediate on these themes and how might we appropriately appropriate them for ourselves? Do any of you feel like rejected stones, individually, collectively? Do you have a sense of destiny, perhaps that hasn’t started yet? I hope we can find hope, whatever our beliefs and feelings towards Mary, Elizabeth, the Tudors or monarchy.

I invite you to re-watch the video and hear the full song by by Martin Phipps and The Mediaeval Babes from The Virgin Queen, when Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth twirls in joy under that tree – it’s track 2 of the OST, ‘The Work of The Lord’. (How does she feel about the death of her sister?) A shortened version will play on the audio of this with a short silence.

This is the penultimate service on the Tudors in our History year. We leave the theme we picked up in our first service on endings and beginnings, ready to round off literally our thoughts in January.

Take as long as you’d like in silence or with the music and words of today’s film clips.

After the meditation, I’ll have some final words as a segue with next time

Today, 403 years ago, the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America. They too were sailing into their destiny, as we might see our next subject as driving into it. It’s brought us forward a century, into the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, and like those pilgrims, we are boarding a ship from England to America. It’ll take us a week to get there, and we have a time lag, jumping in time forward four centuries.

See you on 26^th in 1963 at 8pm GMT

Blessings until next time…and do share constructive thoughts (and introduce yourselves) to betweenthestools@hotmail.com

[Our Christmas service is currently planned for 24^th Dec]

Some Gripes Nailed to a Church Door

Audio:  https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/some-gripes-nailed-to-a-church-door

Welcome to Between The Stools on 29^th October 2023. This date was chosen as the nearest Sunday to 31^st October, the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to Wittenberg church door in 1517. This year is the quincentenary of his wife Katharina von Bora smuggling out of a nunnery in a barrel.

So we are thinking about reformation, but not necessarily exclusively the Reformation. Why are the events of the early 1500s known as the definitive reformation with a capital R? This is one of only two services in our History Year in which we leave Britain, and spend some time in Germany, which is a significant country for the modern world, and not just for the 16^th Century.

Before I share my connection and take on Luther, I’d like to have a brief community chat. Some may wonder why I am not stopping my planned programme to focus on world events. You may have wondered that at other times. You may have noted that I speak about these less of late; it’s not that I’m intimidated to do so, although I have felt fatigued with the constant focus, even in alternative circles, on fear and stress. On the 20^th anniversary of the Twin Towers, I quoted James Alison, and that sentiment – whether James would say so – feels to me to be apt for Israel, Ukraine and Maine. I feel that our eyes and ears are very much guided towards certain situations, and we are invited (if not expected) to stop and gaze at the awfulness happening. I am glad that so many are moved to help and to show their care and also outrage at injustice. I am appalled by suffering and injustice; take it as a given that my heart and prayers are with those displaced, fearful, coping with loss. I am also aware of how the news is curated to instil certain ideologies and for us to have certain opinions, which will allow if not support coming moves. These may be military, or legal; both are political. I am saying: both have a care and to take care; and why are our heads turned almost forcibly in one direction: what are they hoping we’ll not see in the other? James Alison spoke of the One who invites us to look away from the spectacle – not in ignorance or uncaring. Ask: who is benefiting from this (someone always is) and where might this be leading?

Today, we are thinking of another priest who dared to speak out and do different

Let us take a moment and a prayer before thinking on him and others round him

It was interesting researching Martin Luther – born in a three year, 10^th Nov 1483 – to see what people were saying about him, and who. The videos I easily found were by conservative English speaking, often American, Christians. I found two broad categories: those who generally admired Luther and saw him as the father of the (return to) the true church; and those who pointed away from him, for theirs was the true church. I also read some Catholic commenters who didn’t understand how this man could postulate turning from the true church and gaining wisdom and authority from scripture alone.

Well, to our Catholic fiends, I wish to say: I’m not sure Luther did, just turning from the pope: he reformed, not refounded the church (I don’t believe his ‘don’t name a church for me, I’m a bag of maggots’ speech). And the fact that his famous epithet is in Latin (‘Sola Scriptura’) is telling too.

May I be a little personal? Firstly, yes, I am drawn to Luther as a fellow church criticiser and leaver. When I walked out of the Anglican church three years ago, I did think of nailing my article on a church door. (I had one in mind, for a reason). But Martin seems to have picked Wittenberg’s Castle Church not as a symbol of his disillusion but as thel local place that calls for debate were posted. The very last Anglican act I did [in 2020] was to attend a film screening of Luther (2003), with Joseph Fiennes in the title role. I looked to Luther for inspiration and solidarity. How did his list get spread all round Europe, and without the internet? How did he survive possible charges and punishment for the commotion he caused? What if my list too caused a commotion bigger than I’d imagined?

(Other posts relating to my church critique are at

Why ‘The Church’ isn’t Biblical

Why the C of E is wrong – I

Pastoral care is made to care

Martin’s list was picked up by others who used the printing press to spread it. I heard that it took 2 weeks to disseminate round Luther’s city, and 2 months for it to be in other countries, but about a year for it to be known in all Europe. He was called to trial and excommunicated, but this only gave him courage, for what else had he to lose? When his works were publicly burned by order of the pope, Martin burned Leo X’s works, including the papal bull (document of decree) against him, and invited the town to join him…yet there was fear that he could go the way of his writings.

You’ll note I critiqued the church which Luther’s ideas helped form.

I had thought that for Protestants, Luther and Calvin were our heroes and forefathers. I had resisted both because of my tying them to my background and those in it eager that I should know and digest their works and ideas as gospel. [I give an example in the audio] I associated Calvin especially with harshness, although when I did first study him, I found him less so than his supporters. I clarify that even as a young conservative Evangelical, I rejected Calvinism as erroneous. I now certainly do.

A great turning point came around the 500 year anniversary of Luther’s Door Day, at which I attended an event. I bought a booklet by Ted Doe: Who Do You Think you Are? a brief history of Baptists and other Radical Christians in Norwich. He is a Baptist minister. I too come from a Baptist background and became drawn to learning about nonconformist history. Despite my own lifelong personal faith, three degrees including Religious Studies, and attending public lectures on Christian history, I learned something completely new from Ted’s book. I was in my 40s.

He asked us to put our hands up if we were Protestant. If his reader was Baptist, we were to keep our hands down, for such early dissent belonged to a different tradition. No, this was not hairsplitting, but another important but lesser known fork.

The reformation is two pronged: I had hitherto assumed it to be a single stick. What is usually implied as the reformation is in fact a tine: the Magisterial Reformation. This is Luther’s reformed church, tied into the magistrate, the civic office. In short, it is the continued, if not more intimate connection between church and state. It is entwined with political power, and just…power. It continued as a national chain, even if it couldn’t quite be called catholic – universal – in the sense that the church of Rome attempted. The Vatican vied with, if not was replaced by, churches of England, Scotland, the Dutch Reformed, and yes…the Lutheran church. It has big churches – often, as here, pinching the extant ones and de-housing Catholics – robes, altars, licensing and hierarchy. In England, it has a set book. I explored last month and before that Queen Elizabeth I’s “I will not make windows into men’s souls” speech was not a generous indication of toleration and spiritual privacy, but perpetuating the Protestant and Catholic idea that as we can’t know what you believe, we’ll assume your outer conformity to the one church – ours.

But there were those – other than now outlawed Catholics – who would not conform. Their ideas continued to be persecuted, as they had been when Catholicism ruled. There were those for whom the reformation did not go far enough; it was new wine into old skins – that of the Old Testament. (I first heard this biblical phrase used against the church from Ted Doe, although it’s been done since at least the 2nd century, by Marcion). I see it as old wine too: for apart from the removal of colour, statues and screens from inside churches, what really changed? Over here, it was the language of the services, but there were those for whom the Bible spoke another language.

These were the Radical reformers. Their names are not as well known as the leaders – or people we attribute as having led – the Magisterial Reformation. The Radical Reformation wanted to go back to the root (whence ‘radical’ gets its name) and that for them meant the Bible and the early Church.

This included the Anabaptists, a banner for Mennonites, Hutterites – the latter sounding like Old Testament tribes – and the Amish community. My interest hitherto has been in the next century – with the start of Baptists, Quakers, and Independents – and in Robert Browne later in that one. (Yes, I missed off Presbyterians who are between tines). Now I feel a thirst to learn more about these other groups and their leaders, more than the four+ horsemen (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Erasmus) of the nonapocalypse. (We could add Tyndale and Knox, who I knocked in February)

I hope to share my findings and ideas with you at a later date, but for now to flag up that Geneva and Wittenberg are not the only fruit cities in reforming the church.

There seems to be spin on Calvin: passionate Evangelicals debunk him as a murderer and liar, especially for his involvement in burning a non-Trinitarian Spaniard medical doctor called Miguel Serveto (anglicised to Michael Servitus), using scripture against Calvin, whilst another defends, saying he wanted to protect Servetus [there seems to be alternative spellings] and didn’t have the authority to. But most tell me that Calvin was very powerful in his adopted city and ruled it as a theocracy, or rather autocracy. Can I know which is true?

Calvin was far from the ‘leave church and state separate’ of my nonconformist youth – so why do they like him? Is it the harsh doctrines that render humans powerless and agentless? The theology summarised in TULIP is spiritual rape (‘grace’ that can neither be chosen nor resisted, and once drawn in, cannot be escaped) and an unlawful contract because it cannot be freely entered into nor left by the weaker party. As a lawyer, shouldn’t Calvin have known that?! (I’m aware that TULIP is a post Calvin summary by his followers)

Calvin made god in his own image: one of absolute unquestioning sovereignty, who puts to death if you disagree.

It is of concern that both Luther and Calvin were lawyers; that mindset in theology is something I have criticised before. I refer to my January sermon about Job, and see Job’s issues in early Luther at least. For them, God’s relationship with humans is about subservient placation – the method of the latter often being a mystery to the human. What does God want? What is sin – and why are there so many of them? Righteousness is in a legal sense, of being blameless, as opposed to guilty. It is about rule keeping more than a loving relationship. I find that Luther’s works are like the book of Job: a step away from the current ideology into the right direction, but that many steps further are needed. It’s radical when you’re trying to earn your place in heaven and God’s favour to say: it’s grace, it’s a gift, it’s not about you…but that is a theology based round salvation and suffering where deus ex mechina is dragged out as excuse to make it God’s prerogative, which is poor reasoning for one who likes argument and study.

Luther’s 95 theses are lines, sentences – not self sufficient points (doubt is cast over the nailing – but isn’t everything interesting turned into legend, not fact?), mostly on indulgences. He kind of creeps to the pope and says that vicars have authority to forgive sins (he’s ordained). The list is very legalistic, about remissions and penalties, assuming the warped balance sheet of secular law.

Two years on, he writes something more interesting – Babylonian Captivity – in which he says: I didn’t go far enough with the 95…now he openly questions the pope (yea!) and calls the Catholic church the Antichrist (irony coming up).

Luther has already progressed theologically, but his early spirituality is a sad one. He became a monk because of his belief that he’d not yet pleased God enough to go to heaven and avoid hell, so when struck in storm, he makes a contract (more law): save me and I’ll give my life (enter servitude, become yours).

Note that Martin – named for the saint’s day on which he was born – did not address God directly in that storm, but prayed to a female intercessor – and not even a biblical one (ironic for Mr Scripture Alone: where is Mary’s mother St Anne in the good book, good doctor?). As a monk, he was always confessing over nothing for hours; pride, complacence, arrogance….sent him back to the confessional on another loop.

I think he may have had an HSP/other worldly personality, with which I sympathise.

There’s lots of prostration (especially seen in 2003 film): at the lightning lash, as he takes his monastic vows, at his trials (one unappealingly but significantly called The Diet of Worms). This shows much about the hierarchy and abasement and twisting of ‘obedience’ (which means to listen, not comply) in the church.

Luther and Calvin had their brand of religion as their own show: Calvin’s Geneva Bible, published with his notes, translated to fit his theology; Luther’s bible was translated to his poetic and linguistic ear, beautifully I’m told, but he was making constant choices about how Greek and Hebrew best sounded to the ordinary German. I tired of hearing the expression ‘peasant and ploughboy’, as if these roles delineated one’s intellect, and perpetuates the lowly ‘status’ and thus hierarchy, placing these at the bottom (as an academic and churchman, Luther is much higher). He put some Biblical books in an appendix; the Apocryphal ones (Maccabees, Tobit…with purgatory in them) were taken out of the Protestant Bible, and still are. Luther clearly didn’t know what to do with prophecy (Daniel and Revelation – where his image of the Roman church as Antichrist is), and was going to annex part of other books, such as Esther; and he was going to cut the letter of James, which speaks of the importance of works, which clashes with his tenets. Luther’s church (still the Church, St Mary’s Wittenberg) services were his bible, his sermons, his songs and psalms… Yes, you might say I ought to watch that as a criticism, noted.

Luther promoted women as child bearers; if sexual/reproductive desire is strong, then the church can’t make monastics keep their vows. He was still living as a monk and academic (as he’d done since youth) and then knew little of women or family life (of course he did go on to marry and have kinder). His ideas as I’ve read them makes women breeders and helpmeets, unable to discuss as equals. He apparently upheld societal norms regarding work and submitting to city authorities to register to have ‘permission’ to live there.

Luther was firmly against the wicked moneymaking corruption of indulgences – good. What might a fear based lucrative scheme be in our day, involving a narrative of destruction and death? (Clue: one also is a long i word). Note how responsibility to others is also used as an impetus – then and now.

I support the notion of Babylonian captivity, but he and other reformers (note, re-form not reboot or redesigners) seemed to throw out mother with dragon, harshly treating those outside of their beliefs; Babylon, I believe, is wider than the Vatican and has embraced Canterbury and Germany. (I’m not wholly referring to the 20th C for the latter).

In Babylonian Captivity, he says – being crudely and dismissively rude about his detractors – that mass is a legal testament, in the sense of inheritance from one who died (so who died in the Old Testament?). I squawked mightily. Luther says that Christ’s shedding of blood secures his promise (more legality) that we unworthies get eternal life, on the condition of our faith. Even the sacrament (and he yet believed in 3, including penance) is a legal contract – and what strange surety Christ offers! (memorial cannabalism as a renewed promissory note from God). My reading implies that it’s not in fact faith or grace alone, but that a legal promise is required. On p23 of the translation by Wentz et al, Luther writes “For without the promise there is nothing to be believed; while without faith the promise is useless, since it is established and fulfilled through faith.” Hence, I see salvation and heaven are conditional offers for Luther, and that there needs to be an offer and a legal instrument from God (and, implictly, a threat – of what happens if you don’t take up the offer). Not so much grace now, or gospel (ie good news).

There is another tract, perhaps lesser known, on freewill which says that we don’t have one (The Bondage of the Will). That I found rather alarming, but it was necessary – in his mind, not mine – for his doctrine of justification by faith and grace. I’m bemused at how much time theologians spend on debating the mechanisms of grace and salvation, and even prayer. Again, this is a legal argument, this time to refute Erasmus, but saying that it’s watertight is to simply battle Luther back on his own terms. I do not play his way; his is a bizarre game. Logic and dogma come before inner knowing, love and relationship. It is a profoundly unspiritual, unevolved way to see faith and God…a god made in Luther’s image, conformed to law-as-god and the weight of sin as a debt to pay, a bully who causes evil and then punishes others for the outcome. (I’m aware that Luther’s position may have moved towards love and away from law; I like that modern films portray this, for it shows they get and support that message).

I again refer to James Alison, who says in On Being Liked that atonement theory makes sin too big a character in the human story, the one round which all others – including God – dances.

I want us to question why anyone is given giant status that can’t be questioned. Why the films on Luther, with famous actors…but have you seen one on Menno Simon? I could spend much longer in Wittenberg, wrangling over tracts, but I feel more drawn to the critique and to other movers. I want to ask why Luther is allowed to be hallowed by the mainstream.

Was the Good Doktor really good? (I had said, I wasn’t necesarily saying no but nor was I saying wholly yes. Then I read what happened to the peasants). What do you think? Have I rightly understood his final message?

I’m interested in the apocalyptic watershed reformation and how that relates to us now. I feel that another reformation is due, a truly radical one that goes to the root – not necessarily to emulate the early church, but to ask what faith and community are, and about our relationship with God and each other.

I’m also interested in Germany’s role in the wider world and that I’ve heard it is key for its restoration.

Thank you for joining me tonight; blessings to you

Next time is Nov 26^th, and we’ll be in another continent and the 20th Century for a 60th anniversary but I’m adding an extra post on 9th Nov (prerecorded, no set time) on Margery Kempe

Elspeth betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

I Am Your Queen, I Am Myself

Elizabeth and I

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/i-am-your-queen-i-am-myself

Introit: Coronation Banquet (part) by David Hirschfelder from Elizabeth soundtrack

Welcome to Between The Stools on 10^th September 2023, for a special and longer service. On 7^th September, one of England’s most esteemed queens was born – Elizabeth I, at Greenwich, in 1533. She died 70 years later – also in a 3 year, like this one, on 24^th March. Elizabeth has been spoken of throughout our History Year, and although this service isn’t the end of it – that’s January 2024 – there is a sense of culmination and zenith in this month. Not only was Elizabeth the last and perhaps greatest of the famous Tudor dynasty, and the last monarch of England alone; not only is her 45 year reign considered a, if not The Golden Age for this country, but the high point is for a personal reason.

As well as being the 490^th anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, this time marks 50 years since my own. I’m away – being 50! – so this service is pre-recorded. My name, Elspeth, is Scots for Elizabeth – and I do use the R nodding to Regina as well as Rushbrook. I’ve long felt a link with our Fairest Queen…but as I’ve developed this year, I’ve begun to see her and her family differently.

Let us open in prayer and let me explore that with you, with some musical interludes.

Elizabeth original video cover

Elizabeth Tudor was the person who opened the door to my now passionate and defining love of history. I was already interested in historic buildings 25 years ago, when I myself was that age. But the persons who inhabited them were not yet of interest. The film Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett, came out here in October 1998. It was the period setting – and the interest of my companion – which led me to watch it at Norwich’s Odeon. It didn’t become special to me straight away, but I kept finding myself choosing it again on video; the illustrated script, tie-in novel and the wonderful soundtrack were purchased; and then I went back to university, and my masters dissertation focussed on it… I realised that this film, in a year when I went to the cinema every other week and had seen many memorable films (the Truman Show immediately comes to mind), had become my favourite of all time. Elizabeth stayed my favourite film, even though I saw up to fifty a year at the cinema and as many at home, for at least a decade. I was very excited when the sequel, The Golden Age, came out nine years later, and I made a special trip to watch it at a special cinema – London’s Electric, Portobello Road.

But now my experience was very different. In the autumn of 98, I was largely unaware of Elizabeth’s story. I was willing for Shekhar Kapur and Michael Hirst (the director and writer of the Elizabeth film) to shape that void, and I was impressed rather than offended by their approach. They shook off the starched ruffs and peeled away the alienating white facepaint that had hitherto made Elizabeth a recognisable historic icon, but I had never thought of those portraits as being of a real flesh and blood woman whom I could relate to or wished to know. These filmmakers began from within, with Elizabeth as a woman, my own age at the time of the first film, in love for the first time, finding her way in the world, sometimes unsure, vulnerable, learning to stand up and find her own voice. Deeply symbolic (with its red, black and gold theme, based on an unspoken poem by Wyatt) and with a surprising, groundbreaking aesthetic and tone then for a period piece, Elizabeth received many critical accolades as a film, but I was made aware that it was heavily critiqued and eschewed by historians. But my masters dissertation was in film; historical opinions did not yet weigh heavily.

By Nov 2007, I had researched Elizabeth and those round her for some years; I’d written a further dissertation on them. My research degree had involved watching and reading popular depictions of my royal ‘girls’ and analysing how they were portrayed. For me it wasn’t what was true, but how the truth about them was presented. Thus I looked on secondary sources as primary and at how the canon of knowledge – what passes to be true by the dominant group, and who is that group – is created. As academics admitted, popular culture helps shape that cannon as much as their own work; and their own work can be focussed on analysing popular cultural depictions.

So now, travelling to Notting Hill and its luxury Edwardian cinema with reclining leather sofas on a tiny income, I was feeling intrepid as I made my secular pilgrimage. For now, I had definite opinions on Elizabeth, as well as the precedent set by the first film being on my longterm pedestal; and I had also met and come to love Mary, Queen of Scots, who was sure to feature (she did) and I had my own ideas about how her story should go. I had seen another special screen version of Elizabeth’s life, The Virgin Queen with Anne-Marie Duff, made for the BBC in 2005. I thought that Cate Blanchett’s was the definitive performance of Good Queen Bess – and I had watched several by other veteran actors – but I enjoyed this innovative television miniseries and will share some of its distinctive music with you today and in November.

So thus, I was this a little nervous, but the experience was marred only by the many bobbing heads of those going to the toilet – throughout the Armada scene!

It was the following year – and thus two after my academic work was handed in – that I obtained the newly available Golden Edition DVD of Elizabeth. This allowed me to view featurettes – for I’d hitherto only gotten the screenwriter’s introduction – and to hear the director’s commentary.

I realised that I, and the academics whom I’d read, had not understood Shekhar Kapur’s work. With kindred sweeping hands, this Indian Hindu proclaimed that his take on England’s near sacred icon was not about history, but destiny and divinity. He used the real queen to make a story about these operatic themes. He wasn’t interested in matching the locations to historic ones – he was seeking an aesthetic which showed Elizabeth’s world and her journey. He filmed in the north of England, where the real Elizabeth never ventured, for its stony atmosphere. He chose Durham Cathedral to be her royal palace, which in no way resembles Westminster or Whitehall or Greenwich, because he wanted this vast, dark supposedly masculine space (I see it as feminine) to belittle this young woman. He said that Durham’s great church had stood for 500 years in her day and has stood another 500 since and will probably endure many more centuries, perhaps millennia. That cathedral, so incongruent and inaccurate from a historical point of view, made a powerful visual statement. His signature shots from near the ceiling, creating even mighty Elizabeth as tiny, were to reinforce the idea that destiny is bigger than all of us.

In the second film, Elizabeth has achieved her destiny and become an absolute power – rather sadly by cutting out her heart, following a betrayal. I will say that I never understood why Robert Dudley is that betrayer, for no other portrayal or source that I know of makes her great love (and here, controversially, her lover) part of the plot to dethrone Elizabeth with the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots. Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is usually shown as a special friend right up to his death, which undermined her recent Armada victory. Shekhar and Michael chose not to mention this, or Robert again, and instead focus on another similar man – the adventurer Walter Raleigh. Elizabeth’s love in The Golden Age is vicarious, through her lady in waiting Bess Throckmorton. This is the story of what Elizabeth does with her absolute power, and how she reacts to an opposing absolute power of equal force.

I see these films as being like Superman and Superman II (we will spend time with those next year). The first film of each is the classic setting up of the hero, their back story, how they received their powers – or power in Elizabeth’s case. Having assuredly got them and vanquished a major foe, they are free for sequels which test that power, often bringing back villains set up in the first story. In the Salkind’s Superman, it’s General Zod and his two accomplices. In Shekhar’s Elizabeth, it’s Mary Queen of Scots and Philip of Spain, both of whom had mentions and cameos in the first film. That Elizabeth is at the top of her game is shown by the very different sets in the second film. Again, Shekhar chose an English Norman cathedral for Elizabeth’s palace, but now she’s in the Lady Chapel at Ely – the great chamber inhabited by a statue of another venerated virgin. The lighting is light; the colours brighter; the costumes co-ordinated to be symbolic of her Blue Phase – Mary’s colour. Elizabeth is the sun of her court – the DVD extras explain all this, except my virgin observations. But, following the classic hero’s journey, Elizabeth loses her way. She has attained divinity and absolute power, but squanders them on unworthy behaviour. It is like the scenes in Superman III where he sits at a bar, unshaven and drunk, super-spitting peanuts and making holes in oil tankers. Elizabeth is jealous and petty and angry, and becomes weak. Her actions lead to the death of a fellow anointed queen and cousin (although this film states that Mary QS was guilty of treason), and then a huge sea battle that could threaten the independence of her land and the free lives of her people.

But Elizabeth rallies her troops at Tilbury, and – in the only actual screen staging of the Armada that I’m aware of – routs her enemies. Elizabeth stands on the globe, slipped out of her nightie and back into her most royal, if not divine robes, and twirls to powerful music. Her final words are a moving speech – I didn’t feel I could quote them, so I’ll let her:

I am called the Virgin Queen

Unmarried, I have no master

Childless, I am mother to my people

God give me the strength to bear this mighty freedom

I am your Queen; I am Myself

When Elizabeth says, ‘I am your Queen, I am Myself’, it is (I believe) a statement that her divinity is restored. It really is an I Am statement, such as heard in the Burning Bush and Book of John.

Thus these films depict Elizabeth as godlike, and perpetuate the myth that she started.

I’d like a little break – hearing that evocative Love Theme from the first film (by David Hirschfelder) – and then I will speak more of Divine – or Not – Elizabeth.

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I make no apology for the emphasis thus far on film, and one in particular. I’ve stated before my views of fiction vs documentary and academia. I remind that it was a film that opened the door – hitherto one whose knob I didn’t even try – to history for me, but also to two further degrees, and screenwriting: thus it was a seminal life catalyst for me. Perhaps film adaptations of a particular source material – history or literature – are most powerful when from our youth, but it was that film which drew me into Eliza in a way that I don’t think that any other historical drama would have, even though it’s now a favourite genre.

Shekhar and Michael’s film explicitly shows Elizabeth as choosing to emulate the Virgin that she’s taken from her people by perpetuating Protestant Christianity. Geoffrey Rush as spymaster Walsingham says to Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth as she cries by a Marian image in her private chapel (irony noted), “They have found nothing to replace her.” Elizabeth, in a storm and battle – like the denouement of the second film – transforms herself into a conscious image of that Virgin.

I think that this notion is accepted; I’ve picked it up from many other places. It’s continued in Shekhar’s second film by putting Elizabeth’s throne in another Lady Chapel in that Lady’s colours.

What is not accepted so widely is Elizabeth not being a virgin; it is her conscious choice, in this film, to become one. The notion of Eliza not being so physically was controversial as her virginity is held as sacred as her namesake Mary’s; but these filmmakers took a more liberal view, just as some Christians do. Whereas there’s a big theological point at stake about Mary, Elizabeth’s has no real importance, so why is it highly prized and why the double standards of those prizing it?

Elizabeth’s divinity is not just Shekhar Kapur’s idea. In a portrait at the end of her life, by Robert Peake, Elizabeth is in a procession, carried high above a sea of mostly male and darker ruffs, in a ridiculously large white jewel encrusted dress. (Interestingly one other woman is permitted such attire, but she is firmly on the ground and behind her Queen). The white could be for angelicism or divinity – or the wedding that she didn’t have. Michael Hirst has Elizabeth say to advisor Lord Burghley that she is married to England – in a public near-ceremony; her final words by that pen (with William Nicholson) of the next film reflect the same. There’s a hint that she is a holy bride, as much as the church she is head of.

In Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, there are two famous paintings of Elizabeth. Although neither show her in a pearly white dress, both symbolic works proclaim her purity in other ways, and that purity is next to not so much godliness but god-likeness. In the one in the Marble Hall, called The Ermine Portrait, it’s the titular creature with Elizabeth which wears the white, and is cruelly ensnared by a crown. In the one on the stairs, known as the Rainbow Portrait, she has ears and eyes all over her dress, to show Eliza as being all seeing and hearing; the serpent on the sleeve shows that she is all wise. (Aren’t they Illuminati symbols?) The rainbow she holds is about peace, above which is the most arrogant pronouncement in Latin that ‘there is no rainbow without the sun’. This is taken to mean that Elizabeth herself is that sun and that the rainbow’s existence is only due to her great, life giving light, the focus of our day and the source of all. It’s surprising that a Protestant queen didn’t see that as blasphemy and heresy, for Sun worship is Pagan/Heathen, and worshipping her as such breaks the first of the Ten Commandments.

If you visit this much filmed and famed Jacobean house, the myth of Elizabeth is continued by the tour. Elizabeth lived much of her early days in the older wing, now a banqueting hall, which was part of a mostly demolished archbishop’s house. Today’s Hatfield – which features in The Golden Age as well as Sally Potter’s rendering of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – is after Elizabeth’s lifetime. Yet she pervades it as much as movie crews. Laid out in the golden Long Gallery are her long stockings and gloves, showing her slenderness (which is supposed to be appealing); a scroll of her genealogy, going right back to Adam….this is a woman who intended to be seen as an incarnation of of the first order in all senses. I believe that she was behind the message of her contemporary depiction, but it’s interesting that this is perpetuated now, in historic homes as well as popular entertainment sources. At Bristol’s most celebrated parish church, where an effigy of her is kept, the oft used quote that she called St Mary Redcliffe ‘The Fairest, Goodliest and Most Famous in The Land’ underscores that if Elizabeth said it, then it’s true; the fairest goodliest Queen is giving this Gothic sacred structure – my personal favourite – the same praise that she received herself.

The song that Jimmy Somerville chants as the Eliza in Orlando (played by Quentin Crisp) arrives is still today’s sentiment: she’s our fairest queen. Although Blanchett’s Elizabeth is shown as bored by the sycophantic verses spouted at her, expected as part of the courtly love for one’s monarch, I think she enjoyed and encouraged these oblations that are normally for God alone…fount of all wisdom, all powerful… She didn’t dare call herself God, but continued the princely fashion of being seen as God’s anointed on Earth, making her pope-like (which was deliberate, since her father had eschewed the Pope) and even Christ-like. As a woman, there was an easier parallel, less controversial to Protestants who no longer venerated Mary as the fourth cloverleaf of the Trinity (or the emergency services.) I’ve only just found out that she practised the tradition of ‘touching for the king’s evil’ – healing their subjects via the laying on of hands like Charles II was well known for in the next century; but I’m not aware that she was Solomon, a public dispute resolver. Although I’m told that she kindly received the love of her people when she met them, we may wonder what made Elizabeth I stand out from our many monarchs. Even a modest history section in a bookshop or library will include her immediately recognisable image; her life has been filmed more than many other British royals – and we have at least a thousand year’s worth to choose from. She wasn’t even the most long-reigning. So, why is this queen seen as Gloriana?

Eliza was learned, we’re told. The Virgin Queen with Anne-Marie Duff, penned by Paula Milne, makes sure we know early on just how great her scholarly accolades were. She spoke many languages, yet foreign speakers all had to come to her, since Elizabeth (unlike her cousin and mother) never left the country, nor progressed round all of it; under her reign, England acquired others for an empire that lasted 500 years, but she sent others out to subjugate.

Elizabeth presided over great learning: Shakespeare flourished partly under her; a whole 12 volume work was written for her (Spenser’s Fairie Queen); world exploration (read, more of the above) happened at her encouragement, although, as The Golden Age admits, she also accepted the spoils of pirates. It did not admit the slavery. (Yes, Eliza would have known – she’s all eyes and ears, remember).

Under her – although she wasn’t actually on the battle field (or battle sea) – England scored a great victory over enemy superpower, Spain. I’ll say again, as I did at Easter, that burning people in their boats is not something to be proud of.

Elizabeth I, I’m told, was a great ruler. How, exactly? Her policies were wise; they unified; she made England great and prosperous. (How, and at the expense of whom? Irish people, Native Americans…) I’m aware that although I felt a special draw to Elizabeth since Cate’s portrayal, that she was not universally liked. Team Mary Queen of Scots – which is an international group – feel differently. I don’t think that there’s an Elizabeth society, but Mary has a passionate one. Scots may have another view of Eliza, as might Spanish people. If you’re Spanish, I’d love to hear your view of the last Tudor. I suspect it’s far from the opinion that I held for over 20 years. Whereas there’s a novel – and a one woman show – I, Elizabeth (again a divine sounding statement), I suspect you see her as Jane Austen did, in her youthful booklet on English history (‘destroyer of comfort, deceitful betrayer of trust reposed upon her, and Murderess of her cousin…a scandalous….everlasting blot…and died so miserable…’).

If you’re Catholic or Dissenting, you may see Elizabeth as other than Glorious.

In my last section, I want to look at Elizabeth in the context of religion

We’re having another musical interlude before that. It’s her contemporary William Byrd’s special year, but I decided that I’d like another Tudor composer to be our meditation today – Thomas Tallis. Allegedly composed for Elizabeth’s 40^th, I’m blatantly pinching this for my 50^th (thank you, Thomas). This is for 40 voices, in 5 choirs of 8 people. They weave in and out, come in and leave in a polyphonic masterpiece. I remember clearly the first time that I heard Spem in Alium, from the apocryphal Book of Judith. It made me want to paint as I heard it, a graphical response. I wondered if any of you might like to do so. So pause, get something to draw with, and just make marks as you feel led. I’ll show you mine. Or you can just enjoy the music and gather your thoughts, although I find this music so powerful that I can’t think about anything else. It’s about 9 minutes long and this is performed by the King’s School, Canterbury, with the images of those singing popping on and off a video call.

How much do the words relate to Elizabeth?

I’ll leave a brief silence after before leading you into our final section.

Spem in Octagon (based on Ely cathedral as it has a side for each choir). This is part of a family of painting I did which take the structure of Spem and create paintings round it; I’ve the 14 pillars of Norwich cathedral’s nave (the music is 140 bars long), an oval and a rectanglear graphic response based on the actual score… and Waltham abbey where Thomas was choir master (you can see it at the bottom here). What can you come up with? When they start singing ‘respice’, it’s near the end!

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Last month, we were again aware of the alleged Tudor propaganda machine – that’s significant in itself – creating people in the way of that dynasty as undesirable, including Elizabeth’s own mother. This month, our focus is someone who has been created as victorious and glorious and godlike. The Tudors’ opinions of themselves and their enemies have prevailed for four centuries, but they are not universal.

Reading a Catholic church guide, I was most interested to hear their deep questioning of the epithet Good Queen Bess, who killed so many of their forebears. As I dig into my Nonconformist roots, I again hear cries of cruelty against the monarch who ‘would not make windows into men’s souls’ (eg Robert Browne’s supporters who were killed publicly for reading his book that questioned secular authority). That there were many conventicles during her reign – that is, illegal religious gatherings – shows that her reformation was failing many non-Catholics. The fact they needed to meet secretly says something about her alleged tolerance and fairness.

I started to look differently at the Act of Uniformity, seen as an early act in all senses that established Elizabeth’s wisdom and reign of moderation. Cate Blanchett practices her speech to her mirror: “My people are my only care” she tells her black velvet parliament, but I wondered to what extent that she did care about her people, really.

She didn’t care or trust them enough to give them freedom of belief.

Obviously, her father and mother left the Catholic church, but as I’ve said already, Henry was only really interested in putting himself as head of the church and getting his way. That he made new acts after his great ecclesiastical exodus which supported catholic doctrine in all but the papacy shows that his convictions were about self governing and personal allegiance, not about theology and practice. It is his wives and advisors who were the true reformers of the new learning. His son, Edward VI, carried on Protestantism, although he was young and heavily steered, but his elder half sister had the courage to uphold a different faith. Thus Elizabeth had the choice too: of whether to continue the Protestant legacy, or re-introduce the Old Faith. She had supporters and detractors for either, although two key advisors, Walsingham and Burghley, were Protestant. Elizabeth’s life and certainly throne were risked by her Protestant allegiance, for her sister arrested her and held her in the Tower and had her interrogated. She is said to have answered that she would act according to her conscience and not renege the newer faith.

But I don’t think that Elizabeth’s faith was that of her mother’s. I’m learning that Protestant and Puritan are not the same; Nonconformity is different to Anglican protest.

Eliza effectively said: you can privately believe what you want, but publicly, you will do as I say. Preachers will be licensed, by me and mine, and without that license, you can’t perform a sermon and thus share your views on the Bible or more widely. This is how you’re doing services – no making them up, as I [Elspeth] do, to suit your own ideas and gifts, or the request of your congregants. Here is a single book issued for all which you must follow.

I admired her move away from Latin into English, although this also outlawed the Old Way.

I have read of fines for those that didn’t attend the only church available, and Catholics who refused were called recusants. But we’re aware that there were harsher penalties than fiscal and that having a priest on the premises could meant death for him – and you. This was also the law in Scotland at the time.

So what was so offensive about priests to Protestant rulers? And why was Mass so important?

Was it the allegiance to one other than themselves – namely, the Pope? Or that they practised a form of incantation?

Eliza didn’t like priests elevating the host during communion, I’m told, as if she wanted to distance herself from that magical rite, but she did many other things that were surprising, and also ironic.

No pictures of saints in churches; but your own royal arms instead. Elizabeth consulted with an astrologer and occultist, John Dee: he helped choose her coronation day, 15^th Jan 1559, as it was a propitious date. Elizabeth blasphemed when she cursed: God’s…something, even God’s death, which is surely the ultimate offence to a Christian?

The 2007 film extras said that they wanted to show Elizabeth as being tolerant in an age of intolerance, directly linking the Spanish with their inquisition to contemporary Muslim terror. I have a massive issue with that, for it helped equate Muslims with bombing, just as Catholics were linked with the IRA in previous decades. It was easy to use the Inquisition as justification to strike hard against Catholics, as well as looking back to her sister’s reign of horror. As I stated in March, Elizabeth apparently executed about as many as Mary did. The excuse that comes across to me, including in these films, from pro-Elizabethans is that she was striking at terrorists, who happened to be Catholic; her person and realm were in danger. so she must act. Others tell me differently: that this is spin and that Elizabeth was as cruel as she was capricious – and even her fans don’t argue with the latter.

Music: Tielman Susato Dansereye Rondo I

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Although Anne Boleyn begat Elizabeth, for me, Elizabeth begat Anne, for it was my interest in Elizabeth that made me go backwards a generation to learn about ‘the great whore’ whose maternity threatened Elizabeth’s reign, and I found there, I think, a greater queen.

Many Anne stories end with the little ginger girl, tottering away from the fatal blow to her mother, or the teenager at the deathbed of her lion of a father who she looks to for posthumous support and spirit. But I want to reverse that, for what Anne did best was not bear Elizabeth. She wasn’t the crowning glory on the Tudor sun – I query if those 118 years were solar at all.

Like The Virgin Queen, I’d like to end with Elizabeth looking to Anne. One of my favourite novels about this era is The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, where her daughter reads this tome (if one exists, it is not public knowledge) and reacts to the words of her Mum. On her death bed, the royal ring needed to crown the next monarch is found to have a secret compartment. Instead of a lover, as assumed, the lover’s place is held by a portrait of her Mum.

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This has been a personal journey and a work in progress.

I draw you back to my comments in February and earlier about the kind of reign that Elizabeth could have had, vs Mary QS – the divine feminine as opposed to warped masculine that I think that Elizabeth may have been, especially ultimately. And you’ll know which I’ll be looking to…

Lastly: our own destiny, sovereignty, I am… what kind of ruler would we like and be?

It is Mother Mary’s birthday too (8^th): how does she inspire a new kind of leadership?

Do introduce yourselves and share what’s going on for you and what’s important for you

My email is betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Our closing music is a reprise of Cate Blanchett’s “I am your Queen” speech from The Golden Age with music by AR Rahman and Craig Armstrong

Outroit: The Virgin Queen opening theme by Martin Phipps with The Mediaeval Babes

Our next service is October 29th at 8pm “Some Gripes Nailed To A Church Door” – note we’ll change our clocks in Britain that day

A Morbid Taste For Bones

Welcome to Between The Stools on August 20^th 2023

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/a-morbid-taste-for-bones

Our history year takes to 2 medieval men today linked by this quote – which won’t be gory.

Let me open in prayer and I’ll introduce them to you.

I have proclaimed from now ‘til the end of 2024 a Year of Wonders (which will be succeeded by something else marvellous – the wonders will never cease). I’m having a theme in that year as I did in 2022 and 2023. As I’m planning for a film series to be our Easter lens next year (corresponding with its 25^th anniversary which falls on the same day) I am thinking of having film and television related subjects for at least half of our monthly services.

I always watch and read with a spiritual eye, and I’ve been guided to some interesting viewing. I’m impressed by how much of mainstream television does seem to have spiritual content.

Cadfael

Our first man of the day is a fictional medieval mystery solving monk, Brother Cadfael, created by novelist Edith Pargeter in the 1970s and 80s with a television show in the next decade. Edith (writing Cadfael as Ellis Peters) would’ve been 110 next month and Cadfael’s real life abbey at Shrewsbury is 940 this year.

Our service title today is taken from the first book in the Cadfael chronicles series (although it wasn’t filmed until the second series of the ITV drama). Some material will be saved until next year – I liked the thought of an August Augustinian (he’s actually Benedictine), so I will briefly overview and then focus on that title’s relevance.

When researching for my own mystery story, I gorged on several existing series. Cadfael seemed set apart from others, as much as he is by his cowl. Yes, the head boy/girl interference is still there and the title of the first book is true of the genre. Why do we make murder mysteries into something to consume as entertainment? There’s little to no emotion in these puzzles: it could as well be a word game or one of those escape room conundrums, and I disdain the clinicalness with which a lifeless person is dealt with – even by this monk. Prints come before grief, forensics before farewells – who says that crimesolving is more important than the needs of the bereaved? (Cadfael pushes off Anna Friel from her dead father saying “Evidence”.) Hence I am not usually drawn to whodunnits.

Cadfael, however, is somewhat different, because there is compassion and wisdom in his tales. He is a man of faith, and a healer, with social commentary. There is a difference here between justice and law, in rules and what’s right. Cadfael has integrity. There is genuine compunction and healing – not just of the herbal kind – in many stories. They are also based on real times and happenings. I could say much about the beautiful town of Shrewsbury on the English/Welsh border (I did here) and the divided reign of Stephen and cousin Matilda – perhaps I may next year. But what I did want to speak on was the aspect of the story in its title.

Although often not admitted to in abbey guidebooks and websites, bone stealing was common. A relic was recently recovered to Fecamp, Normandy. It seems that the era of Cadfael – the 12^th century – was especially busy for this trade – and yes, I read that there were people offering this professionally, such as the catacomb robber of Rome. Manuscripts support the notion that Durham cathedral took Bede’s body and that its being the resting place of all Northern famous saints is an ecclesiastical Monopoly sweep – for those supposed holy men weren’t initially buried in Durham. In terms of a crime mystery, there is a clear motive for these churches to acquire relics, since relics = pilgrims (read paying visitors) = income for the abbey. Not every great church had them – Norwich survived without a special buried person as a lure – but those that did reaped the benefits. Durham had Cuthbert (and Aidan, Oswald…), Ely had Ethel, as we thought of recently; nearby Chester had Werburgh; St Edmundsbury had St Edmund (who we thought of in November), and in the same county of Shropshire, Much Wenlock had St Milburga for people to visit for healing. And what did recently completed Shrewsbury yet have in 1138? Prior Robert, who is real, had been speaking of St Winifrid of Flintshire (NE Wales) for some time, creating a hubbub about this young miraculous late woman. It seems to me that he was determined to get her, claiming that her native Welsh village wasn’t looking after her remains properly and that so many more people could benefit from her in a bigger town in a mid sized abbey, like his own.

Note that Wales, a separate country at the time, is smaller and that it hung on to old customs that the Romanised urban institutions could consider ‘backward’. I would like to say that I’m sad that the English name for Wales means ‘foreigner’ and I would like to call them neighbours. Edith’s stories are sympathetic to Wales; Cadfael is Welsh, and she had Welsh forebears.

Thus the first penned Cadfael story is the tale of how those bones were brought across the border and how the Welsh village of Gwytherin (now called Holywell for the miraculous healing spring in her honour) gave her up. Saint-supporting accounts say that the bones were bought, but Edith as Ellis writes that at the time, Wales didn’t have money. That fascinated me. Hence the abbey’s offerings was more than just an attempted bribe, but a bewildering insult and meaningless to this Celtic culture. Edith’s story is a brilliant twist – it suggests that Wales wasn’t deprived of Winifrid after all (they now have half a thumb, as do Shrewsbury) and that she was able to do miracles from a distance…or (does Cadfael’s rendering imply) that something psychological is behind the miracles?

I do very much believe in miracles, including distance healing, but I am unsure about the power of relics. It is an anathema to my upbringing and I am aware of the misuse of this trade.

If you’ve thoughts on or positive experiences of a relic of a saint, let me know.

My top critique of this tale of Catholic vs Pagan, Wales vs England, town vs country, establishment vs local community, is the view of the monk whose swooning visions are used to mount an expedition to Wales to claim the bones. ‘God has told me’ is very convenient; if God’s will can be made plainer with acts of God, all the better. I’m glad that Cadfael critiques the practice of bloodletting, and it’s easy to see how a faint keen young man might have visions via lightheadedness as much as righteousness. But it forgets that some people are higher minded, unworldly – hence Columbanus may be rightly in a monastery. He may be what we may term highly sensitive, or even – alien to the Catholic chain he lived in – a star seed. Yes he may also be an annoyingly devout person which makes others feel inadequate. I didn’t like Cadfael’s statement (on TV) that Columbanus is ill; he is deeply misguided as it turns out – for I am clear that no true voice of God or any saint or heaven sent being would incite to anything violent and corrupt. (Is it ironic that the Holy Well is now a secular government site? Shrewsbury Abbey later pinched Winifrid’s Uncle, key to some versions of her story, though not Edith’s)

Watching the episode, I smiled at the likeness between what I was seeing in 12^th C Wales and what had happened ten years ago in Leicestershire. There was someone who’d long laid without proper respects, respects which could create new and lucrative fortunes for those who found and possessed it. Not, as at Shrewsbury, a virgin who had hung on to her chasteness despite violent pressure to the reverse (how like St Audrey) and whose head miraculously stuck back on whilst the person who struck it off and would have raped her (and taken her vows of chastity) melted like wax. What an interesting moral to that tale, which has become the key pilgrimage site in Wales. No, this second person was one who was not posthumously meant to have worked miracles; he was not sainted in the Celtic or Roman sense, nor even called holy. Yet there is a cult around this man, who died on Tuesday (22^nd) and whose brief reign began 540 years ago. He’s a well known, controversial figure of English history, born in Fotheringhay (where Mary, Queen of Scots died) in 1452 on the same day as Violet Jessop. And ten years ago, he hit international news. It’s that story that links Winifrid and the monks of Shrewsbury and…

Richard III

This is a service, so I’m seeking spiritual content not a historic assessment, but my interest in history is about mythmaking and what the sources say: I treat secondary sources (the popular materials in any media) as primary. I do have an academic background, not that (or its absence) makes one more or less capable of presenting intelligent research.

My first night in the beautiful, historic much visited city of York (remember that description) took me to two related places. During the day, I went to one of York’s many museums, this one being in one of its four medieval city gates – the Monk’s Bar. Within was a tableau of a courtroom, and one was invited to read the materials displayed sometimes as mock tabloids, about the mannequin in the dock – Richard of York, formerly Duke of Gloucester, and briefly king of England. It encouraged you to make up your own mind about the reputation of this infamous man. That night, the Shakespearean play, such a driving force behind the evil child murdering hunchback version, was at the cinema. Not the creepy 1950s Laurence Olivier film, but a contemporary retelling with Al Pacino, both as director and star. It was a commentary, a behind the scenes, and an adaptation. Al sat roundtabled with a back to front baseball cap in an American high rise office; he went to the basketball courts of African American ghettos and asked: What does this play, this line, mean to you – especially the famous opening one. It is the only time that I’ve seen standing ovation for a film, remarkable as it wasn’t a guest star screening or at a festival, but an honest response to a brilliant and unusual film. It is called Looking For Richard. Remember that title.

So that film and museum made an impression, but it didn’t make me seek out Richard III. It was about 20 years later that I realised that he may be a male Anne Boleyn. Both darkhaired, they were given ‘deformities’ which – appalled as I am to say – were supposed to match depraved character. How sickening such a tenet is, and how wrong!! Both were victims of Tudor propaganda, which had been largely successful for centuries. Both had 2-3 year reigns and died by the Tudor sword in their 30s. And both now have passionate proponents and are divisive, famous figures, and their graves unmarked and I argue, known.

So wasn’t Richard III going to be someone whom I would enjoy getting to know?

It was another visit to York where I learned – in the now rather different Richard III museum – that his remains had recently been found under the council’s social services car park and were reburied in pomp that year in the local cathedral. Not York – where he asked to be buried, and the shire of his family home, one of our two archbishop’s seats and one of our largest and most famed churches which has stood in for Westminster abbey in films. No, local to the carpark.

I visited Leicester in 2016, a vital time for the city and university. I’ve explained my initial reaction in my other blog. In a city and shire less known for tourism than many others, I diagnosed a case of arrowpinger envy for Leicester, which also has no beach, docks (tourism dressed as racism regret), national parks, famous painters, musicians, writers (Sue Townsend of course) – but not Bronte, Austen, Shakespeare, The Beatles…nor cathedral city like Lincoln. Or York. And no Mr Hood. I’m well travelled in Britain but Leicester was a city/region I was slow to visit although its centrality meant that I could have, if I’d wanted to. Even the football team was not enjoying the recognition and outcomes they might. Then…in spring 2016…. not only do the Foxes enter the premiere league, but the Richard III museum opens, yes on the site of the carpark. Now you don’t just come for orange or mouldy cheese, Fox’s glacier mints, or Walker’s crisps…or even the National Space Centre (an earlier attempt at drawing visitors.) The city (only so since 1927) had two sets of ubiquitous banners: Fox football, and Richard, Richard.

I even called the skeleton’s twisted spinal condition “twistonitus touristmagnus”!

But then The Lost King film came out last year and I started to recast my view.

There’s a clear parallel with Basil Brown and The Dig – the story of finding the Sutton Hoo boat burial treasure in World War II Suffolk. The film of the previous year based on a novel also championed the overlooked non-academic whose determination and skill had led to this incredible find, but who had been sidelined by institutions. I hear that the institutions involved didn’t like their portrayal – either set.

I was well open to believing that a university was capable of badly treating a clearly well informed person but without their accolades and community, and that it would react to that story coming to light. I believe that as individuals, we can be prime movers and achieve much alone, and we often need to be tenacious. I also believe in synchronicities and signs – as at Shrewsbury abbey, so possibly at Leicester Greyfriars. However, in analysing materials on both sides of the King In A Carpark story, I became aware of motives and spinning. For my mystery was not ‘did Richard kill the boys in the tower’ or ‘was he a good king or not’ or if he should have been king, but: how is he being presented at the moment, and what is this war – of Philippa Langley with Steve Coogan vs University of Leicester – really about?

Firstly, I’d like to continue to point out that documentaries are not truth…they are often patronising, repetitive, with doom music and people labelled as experts who often don’t explain their conclusions. Documentaries pick angles and shape material as much as fiction – which often does so more interestingly (to be rude about film/novel is to show ignorance of the craft yes I do write – see the ‘about’ tab).

Why are four about Richard on a popular platform focussed on death, burial and discovery, with lots of unquiet skulls in the screengrabs? There is little about who the king was in life and what he did right and why the tyrant image is untrue. Two documentaries are narrated by the same man: one focussed on Philippa Langley; the other more on Leicester University. Why that university, not de Montfort, also in the city? Academics from Leicester were labelled as such; others on one video were not named so we assumed that they were also at that university, but another film showed that Dundee and Loughborough (also in Leicestershire) were involved.

Philippa Langley is now part of the myth. Is her version (as told through The Lost King) fair? Is there only one truth? Note that her project used Al Pacino’s film title, and that she assumed the sobriquet Kingfinder, refracting that of the Earl of Warwick in Richard’s story (Kingmaker).

Before I go further, I must state that I’ve no wish for a personal attack, which would be entirely inappropriate in a service or for a spiritual community.

The typically British film is co-penned by co-star Steve Coogan, who wanted to champion Philippa’s story. The actor, Sally Hawkins, who plays her is very different – why the roundhead hairstyle? I felt that the film egged up; a brief glance at her own book showed that at least one ‘fact’ was misleading. I wondered if Leicester’s Greyfriars wasn’t already located. Friaries took up a major chunk in major towns and I’ve seen old maps of many British cities which show this, if it’s not already obvious with street names, plaques and ruins today. Apparently, yes the friary’s whereabouts was known, but not absolutely pinpointed, but it was not the complete mystery that the film shows it to be. That is also clear from Philippa’s own book, yet she claims that the film is her story, without artistic licence, and had taken years of research to back it up.

A former employee of Leicester University (who, like Philippa, doesn’t have an academic title) who is portrayed negatively publicly stated that he had thought of suing. I noted that all the detracting articles about the portrayal were by the establishment – the BBC, Guardian, historical journals and major museums. Philippa’s own website and that of the Richard III society she’s a leading part of goes through why all Leicester University’s statements are wrong, or at least, misleading.

I did note with surprise that Philippa was sharing in their work on all the documentaries. She was present as bones analysed, informed as test results came in, and at press conferences. It seemed to be filmed as things were discovered. So was she really sidelined?

There was a scene where Philippa cried (typical documentary emotion) but I agreed: this is a real person, not just bones on a table (and like Cadfael, the whitecoats were too clinical). If I asked myself, how would I feel if this were Anne Boleyn? I understood the tears, but not all that came next.

The deluge as the skeleton was found felt like the springs at St Winifrid’s – often sudden water is a show of divine power and approval. Was it here? (Was the rain to spoil the dig, sent by whom?)

Why a royal standard covering before any prayers? And before we knew whose skeleton.

I wondered about the supposed definitive proof and how it was presented.

I’d like to share some notes on my thoughts:

Can we trust their methods? Radiocarbon dating is unreliable – the staff doing them admitted that the Carbon 14 levels were messed up by the corpse’s fish diet. Creationists explained that the measurement it’s predicated on is not the constant rate that’s claim, so it’s often wrong. Creationists are controversial but are another example of people who are excluded and whose science is rejected by the mainstream. (I spoke of these in Sept 2021, which has several relevant points to this service: digging up bones, science and an overlooked discovering woman).

It is science, not historians, are running this – technological take over of past as well as present.

(Not future, if I can help it).

I also query the ethics of asking a real life person with Richard’s alleged affliction – scoliosis – to undertake battles to see if a person with a twisted spine can fight well as Richard did. Did they not put him at risk, emotionally and physically? The narrator said that Dominic Smee ‘put his personal feelings aside for science’. I didn’t like that at all. It had familiar echoes!

What of the mitochondrial DNA tests on the two living relatives? Is that fair to them, considering all the things that the whitecoats claimed they could find out about you from having a sample of it? Can you really be sure it matches a long buried person, 17 generations later? There’s too much on computer ‘data’ – forgetting that these are real humans!

Who’s the re-burial for? Leicester, England? Philippa Langley?

C’est combien? Is it necessary and good use of funds – whose? If Edmund’s body were found, I’d rather those millions were spend on abbey rebuilding, not all these tests and pomp.

No royalty were at the funeral, which began on battle site Bosworth field (private farmland).

The video of the funeral was Channel 4 coverage where Philippa (not Simon the narrator often with her) was invited to the Couch with Jon Snow and with a front row cathedral seat; she was explicitly identified as the finder and force behind the project.

Richard’s re-interment gives a back of book also-ran cathedral a reason for high visitation. (I’ve been going round these for 30 years and am writing 2 books; Leicester was ‘well, as I’m here’, not a special trip or highlight, as others were). When I went, St Martin’s cathedral showed nowt about its beliefs, activities, services in either sense – just RIII. Yes, the ceremony was a few months ago, but surely the cathedral is not simply defined by its modern secular shrine?

Richard was re-buried as ‘brother’, ‘servant’, ‘baptised Christian’, anointed king, to rise in glory (to quote from the service). No-one said he had a faith, although a Tony Robinson documentary said that he had complex theological books in his possession and another site called Richard ‘pious’ but that wasn’t explained. When I did a search under those keywords, it was difficult to find results: clearly his faith wasn’t what Richard was best known for.

No-one at the service argued he was especially good; in his (could I call that a sermon?) the bishop of Leicester carefully remained open to either the ‘Shakespearian or Ricardian’ view. (The Richard III website listed some good deeds to the poor, such as £115 today to a roadside beggar and a concession to a widow, but…am not convinced he was especially unusual or worthy)

Anglicans buried him but Richard lived in Catholic times (Archbishop of Westminster took part; other faiths present). Philippa wanted him buried by Catholic rites but wasn’t allowed.

I noted the ceremony of giving of the body from one institution to the other (each in stupidest outfits). Should the University of Leicester have had that body so long and carried him in plastic bags and cardboard boxes?

Is it significant that Leicester was heavily and additionally locked down during covid, so that much of the filming of The Lost King took place in Edinburgh, although Scotland had more severe restrictions on the whole than England?

To round up: the presentation of Richard’s body is very careful, from the uncanny luck in finding him, the tests all being positive (although a few tension-making sags in the middle… what if it’s a woman, or the wrong era?), the facial reconstruction that with a wig and hat would’ve looked like him any way, the use of Handel’s rousing Zadok The Priest (composed for George III 300 years later), the tears, the Channel 4 couch, the clashing red and purple clergy outfits, and use of military. We are being told who to name when we think of the conveniently named ‘king in a carpark’ story (other kings and queens are buried in parks; John Knox, revered by some, reviled by others (me), is under a law court).

It is good to be wary of what we’re told, to question, to be mindful of layers and constructs, to ask: who benefits. It is also good to champion the ordinary folk, not to privilege the privileged, to sideline those not of your ilk, not of the establishment. It is good to note the little things, to examine for truth, as historians and mystery solvers need, and yes to trust your gut – for I believe that feelings are important for guiding us and that intuition is very powerful. It is also important to have tenacity and patience – for both halves of tonight’s themes involved many years of dreams, plans, work and battling.

Do introduce yourselves, and if you want to stick up for Leicester – I know you’ve a broad architectural heritage – or Richard, or you’ve a view on St Winifrid and Cadfael, do write in; similarly, if you’d like prayer or to hear about the services direct.

We’ve been pre-Tudor this month and thought of the person whose defeat set up their reign; next, we go to the end of Tudors when Richard III was written – what propaganda have we believed about the Tudors these centuries? So we’re thinking of Elizabeth I. Next time is Sept 10^th, non live as I’ll be celebrating, but it will be a full service with music. Thank you for joining me and I hope to see you then

Do email me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Magdalene Sunday 2023: Anne, Anne and Jane

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/magdalene-sunday

Welcome to our Magdalene Sunday of 2023 when we will honour – with and without a ‘u’ – three special women who embodied the spirit of Magdalene. I believe that Mary M is not a redeemed prostitute as the Catholic church pedalled for many years, but Jesus’ No 2, who best understood and embodied his message. Her surname means ‘tower’ or ‘enlightened one’ – it’s a title of honour.

I would go further and say that despite an evangelical upbringing, I’ve come to see Mary as divine, or at least the human embodiment of the divine feminine, along with Jesus’ mother, the other Mary. However, I differ from some who elevate Magdalene in that I don’t see her as Jesus’ partner.

You can read more about my Magdalene thoughts here.

WONDER WOMEN: A Sermon For Magdalene Day 2020

In previous Magdalene services, I’ve compared Mary M to Wonder Woman – yes I did eventually see the second film, 1984, which didn’t go where I expected although it did take a much needed swipe at capitalism; the next year, my late Mum was the speaker for Magdalene Sunday, since it coincided with her 70^th; and last year, Diana, Princess of Wales was our focus – in the month of what would’ve been her 61^st birthday. I see Diana a very human manifestation of divine feminine.

I shared before – most recently at Easter – about my belief that one can be a real human and embody the divine, and have allegorical and what director Shekhar Kapur calls ‘operatic’ meaning in one’s life, even consciously. He saw ‘operatic’ meaning in the subject of his Elizabeth films, whom we’ll discuss in September close to her birthday.

Tonight, I wish to turn to her era, but before her reign.

Our first woman of the half hour is Elizabeth’s mother, whom we spent some time with during Lent and Easter. The second is a woman who was meant to stop Elizabeth’s half sister from reaching the throne. The third woman, who I’ve not talked about yet, wasn’t interested in a game of thrones at all.

PRAYER

There is something that unites these three women, other than their gender, country and time: their death. All three were executed, and all arguably were martyrs. I believe them to be. When researching this, the manner of their deaths and their sufferings before came much to the fore. I make clear that I do not wish to focus on this. This is a spiritual community, not a gore fest. I see no merit in wallowing in such details, which are distressing, and relegate their lives and achievements to an unpleasant end. It is what they stood for which interests me. Why did they die? Why were they each seen as a threat? I do not see their endings as a failure or loss – it rather says more about who gave the orders (never exculpating those who carry them out). I believe that we all, on a soul level, must choose from a small number of exit strategies: these three, living in violent and tyrannical times, left Earth via the orders of the same family – the Tudors.

Each of tonight’s women feature in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a catalogue of Christian sufferings compiled by one John Foxe in the 16^th C. Its language is as colourful as its monochrome woodcut illustrations. I borrowed a copy published in Chicago by the Moody Press. Its date is unrecorded – it misses off the usual bibliographic information – but was purchased in the mid 1960s. Its title is “Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World” – not the original – and Anne Boleyn, keenly recorded by Foxe, does not have an entry. The jacket flaps tell us that this unpleasant read is necessary to remind us that in renewed times of persecution and “terrors at the hands of Satan-driven men”, we may have to face what our forebears did. This injunction repeatedly uses the phrase “shall we not…” refracting a famous speech of a modern martyr who we’re thinking on in November.

Thus the author of the blurb of this edition draws the reader in personally with a challenge, ending with the words “alarm call.” I am alarmed by all the above, and felt uneasy with this volume. There are few words about many saints – saints of the reformed, not Catholic sense – although of course, Catholics have many saints, in both senses, themselves. I just want to honour those especially who in the same era suffered on the other side. The entry on each person tells us of how their bodies wore out in this world, but little to nought of what they were martyred for.

This is an ideologically abridged version, as I’ve found sections elsewhere that are missing here. Occasionally, there are brave quotes of those flouting the flames, refusing to change their faith under the ultimate pressure. In contrast to the hysterical heretics at the start of Shekhar Kapur’s film Elizabeth, the martyrs which Foxe records prayed publicly before their execution in a firm, clear voice. When his impending doom was described to him – as I shall not be doing – a Suffolk man called Kerby said that any who witnessed his departure would say “‘There standeth a Christian solider in the fire’: for I know that fire and water, sword and all other things, are in the hands of God, and He will suffer no more to be laid upon me than He will give me strength to bear.”

Why didn’t Moody Press put that on the back of the dust jacket?

Our first woman is someone that I’ve touched on from February, which was when she died. This month of July is when she reigned – for just nine days. Jane Grey might easily be relegated to a footnote of English history, a pub quiz question. We learn little of her via Foxe, who focusses more on the woman (whom we thought of in March) who had her executed. Foxe’s Lady Jane is like the traditional Virgin Mary: mild, obedient, good. She takes the throne because she’s asked to; she gives it up for the same. She’s womanly enough to faint when greatness is thrust upon her. At the scaffold she states the wrongness of taking what was Mary’s. She shows those British traits of acceptance and lack of emotion. And she would not turn to Catholicism (which I doubt would have saved her, since she was convicted of usurping the throne). Thus, according to Foxe (and his unnamed editors of Illinois), she died a good death.

Recent historians have made out Jane to be an unfortunate pawn; a few have attempted a feminist revision of her short life. Modern documentaries – a media I struggle with – have both stylised repeating tableaux of murky menacing throne grabbing lords, and serious historians sitting begloved in archives, wrangling over Edward VI’s teenage handwriting. For me, neither approach is convincing or satisfying; and I’m not concerned with the terms of his device of succession and whether Jane was a traitorous usurper or deposed legitimate claimant.

I find the near death questioning of Jane’s faith interesting – it is similar in content to the answers of our last lady. Jane begins by seemingly quoting back a catechism, but then there is a question that although predictable, required Jane to show her own religious reasoning. Teenage Jane had theological logic: how can Christ as God have truly died for us in a once for all in sacrificial atonement if he had two bodies – one on the cross and another to be continually eaten during communion? Instead of converting to the Romish way, Jane exhorts her questioner to be moved by the Holy Spirit to hers, or face damnation. This tableau inspired a painting: Jane was more than a tragic failed footnote of history to 18^th C artist John Ogborne: she was a Protestant martyr.

I wish to turn again to that maligned medium – feature film – which I champion, along with fiction. Documentary and academic tomes aren’t automatically or even generally greater forms of truth, as I have said before. I’m interested in Lady Jane’s portrayal in a movie with Helena Bonham Carter in the title role. What was this saying about our world and hopes to change it?

In this film, the arranged marriage between Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane is a love story, and this pair courageously plan to change England and beyond. There is a memorable glass smashing scene where the newlyweds state their hopes for a more equal world, punctuated by dropping a goblet for each point of their manifesto. Guildford has understanding of the world outside their privileged cocoons; and whether we think that the real brother of Lord Robert (who would become Queen Elizabeth’s favourite) did, the point is that this film shows him as having this awareness to help awaken his bride. They both have a deep sense of justice, and want to use the positions thrust upon them to fight for fairness.

It could be said of them, as was of biblical queen Esther: “You have come to royal position for such a time as this”. Esther 4:14

The film was premiered in 1986, the year before the great Harmonic Convergence, a long prophesied end to the hellish cycles punctuated by a peace summit to bring in the new age. It coincided with He-Man and She-Ra – another duo who fight for justice in a seemingly innocuous TV show which alerts to deeper truths. I believe that in that decade of heightened capitalism and materialism, Cold War (where we again were encouraged to demonise rival superpower Russia), where leadership took away more civil rights and made greater divisions between rich and poor, the different and those approved of, here came a film based on history but which was a vehicle to challenge those things in our time as much as the 1550s.

What moves me is that a 1980s film wanted to say this of Jane Grey and her husband Guildford (who was potentially a pawn as much as she) and to use that couple to speak that vital gospel.

Our second lady of the night is linked in two ways: she has also been portrayed on screen by Helena BC – this time in 2003 – and there is a possible understanding of her relationship as a pairing which challenged the status quo and brought about change. I’m reluctant to call Henry VIII a twin flame but I do see a link to a modern Henry, also red haired and the royal second son who married someone outside of usual expectation and had to fight for that relationship. The parallels between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle might be clearer with his great great uncle David/Edward VIII (his actual name was different from his regnant title) and Wallis Simpson. I have heard spiritual teachers speak of Meghan and Harry as twin flames with an important role, carrying on the reforming work of Harry’s mother. I can also link via the racism that both Meghan and tonight’s second subject experienced; the latter was vilified for having darker skin.

I again refer to Queen Anne Boleyn; whatever her consort embodied (clue, not Jesus), I and others have seen in her the divine feminine redolent of She Whom We Honour Today. I even wondered if Anne was a reincarnation of that divine. It seems that she was joined with someone who was the very aberration of divinity, but that his vile ego was used to create what New Agers would call a new timeline. However, as I further understand the difference between Protestant and Dissent, I cannot now say that I feel God used Henry VIII, and I reject the church/state he created. I am thinking of the significance as once again, Britain is cast adrift from the rest of Europe, and the comments that French writer Vercors made in the 1960s about Anne Boleyn and her influence on this nation to continue to stand alone.

(I said more on Anne Boleyn during Easter and at her last anniversary).

During Lent, I spoke of the Bible in one’s own language as being key to Anne Boleyn’s mission, and to another, whom we would think of today: our third lady.

Anne Askew, like John Foxe, was born in Lincolnshire – I feel a pilgrimage coming on. He was her contemporary, but reports of Anne Askew’s birth year vary; they seem to be born within 5 years of one another. Anne’s story recalls Bristolian Dorothy Hazzard in the next century (more sermon fodder) whose religious convictions also led her to leave her conservative husband for faith spreading. For Anne, Bible reading was freedom. It’s perhaps the most exciting part of evangelical teaching – although that word has changed use since the 16^th century and non-catholic labels are often misapplied by outsiders, and so I must be careful of that myself.

For Anne Askew, being able to read the Bible was a great leveller. She travelled to London and participated in Bible studies with men and women and those of different ‘classes’, freeing her from the strictures that the establishment placed on everyone. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the establishment disliked this freedom. It took away their hegemony. Priests – even post reformation ones – no longer had all the secret knowledge of what the Bible contains and sole power to dispense it. ‘Ordinary’ folk were able to share and debate its words – not just be told what it says. Latin was the language of conquering elitists, which is why I dislike it and won’t use it (relevant to our Christmas service); it hitherto had been the only translation of the Bible.

To translate the Bible into one’s native tongue had been a capital offence for centuries: William Wycliffe died for it; and being caught with a copy was dangerous to reformation Germans too.

Then in 1538, Henry VIII decreed that every parish should have one, known as the English Bible – the first ‘authorised’ version in that language (I’ve heard that the version of that title in the next century was not truly authorised, but note that it was again issued in the name of the king). Having the tome placed in churches meant that it was accessible to all and that laity read it and discussed it in groups (according to Karen Lindsey) whilst priests had to stand by. That five years on Henry suddenly created it an offence for women and men below a certain rank to read their holy book tells us as much about him and his true feelings on reform as it does about the capricious and unjust nature of law.

Anne Askew had been among those of the new religion who had gathered her household, including servants, round her and as today’s evangelicals would put it, ‘opened God’s word’. When confined to bear children, she carried on teaching the servants who attended her. When the Bible ban came in, Anne complied, because she didn’t actually read the Bible; she’d memorised large sections and so just recited instead – to other people.

Anne allegedly learned of the new learning via her Cambridge educated brothers who were kidnapped during the Pilgrimage of Grace – a Catholic uprising against Henry. This, it’s said, cemented her view of the old way, but she was expected to marry a local who still upheld it. He disliked Anne’s Bible teaching and was advised to send her away, in the hope that Anne would cease this unwomanly behaviour, but it actually set her free. Her husband and his advisors didn’t know that the Bible says, in Paul’s words, that if an unbelieving spouse of either sex separates from you, that you are no longer bound by that marriage (1 Corinthians 7:15). I’d add that this section is clearly headed “I, not the Lord, say”, thus being Paul’s advice not God’s law, but it was scripture enough for Anne to feel vindicated and released. She reverted to her birth surname of Askew and moved in with her brother and then to London to petition for a divorce, taking lodgings in the Inns of Court (the legal district) where she was introduced to sympathisers of the New Learning. People who spread this by teaching were known as Gospellers; Anne earned the adjective ‘fair’ allegedly for being female, nice looking and genteel. I find that disappointingly point-missing: one’s looks are irrelevant to the Gospel, and the capital’s taverns and churchyards apparently seethed with groups that didn’t recognize rank and gender as dividers.

I think this is why the conservative faction panicked so. It wasn’t their commitment to the Roman way but to their own power, as Anne ably and daringly pointed out to the bishop of Winchester. Stephen Gardiner had enjoyed new wealth of dissolved monastic lands; he’d upheld Henry’s claim to being the head of the English church (thus surviving, unlike More and Fisher), but still wanted suppression of the protestant populace. He was keen to move on Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, another Protestant reformer, perhaps (guesses Lindsey) to gain favour for having influenced Mrs Tudor #7. It seems that Anne’s fate was based on this larger political move. Surely Anne Askew, who became famous on the London New Learning scene, would have associations with Queen Catherine and her set? Anne was tortured after being condemned, which upset even the Tower’s constable, (odd that even torturers have a code of honour) but this unprecedented act appears to have been for the purpose of bringing the Queen’s downfall, as Anne was asked to name those of her ‘sect’. Anne did not supply the information wished for.

Anne had wittily and cleverly handled the first round of trial, where many supporters were present. She knew the Bible better than her questioners and frustrated them by using their sexism against them. As a poor woman, how could she expound the Bible before so many learned men? They’d wanted to draw her out on transubstantiation, which oddly hung on as orthodox belief. Henry’s Acts (in both senses) show that it was some of his wives who were protestant; and that not only did he hang on to Catholic tenets, but that he suppressed all believers who didn’t uphold the golden rule of his religion: that he was at the top of the pyramid and controlled everything.

When she was arrested again the next year – 1546 – Anne held forth: the Lord’s statement that he is the Door did not make him present in every portal, so surely her detractors realised that his statement “I am The Bread/Vine” was likewise metaphorical? Evangelicals are oft critiqued for being too literalist and not understanding allegory, but Anne, like Jane Grey, showed that the New Learning can discern; for them, inappropriately verbatim renderings were the province of Catholics.

My own view on the bread and wine is less fussed either way, but I think that it is the hegemony of the magic in the ritual – the incantation ‘hocus pocus’ is apparently a corruption of the Latin for ‘here is my body’ – that the traditional catholics were defending.

Anne left us an account of herself which was posthumously published in Germany; that so little of that is in the Moody Foxe volume (and I’ve yet been unable to read it elsewhere) shows that we are being influenced second hand. Once again, academia hopes to make the masses pass through them to gain knowledge. The Bible in English is much like today’s internet – it allows people to know and discuss things which are hitherto hidden. Although I’m unsure if having the Bible in English heightened literacy, there is the potential that being able to read the Bible allows you to read anything, and also that much can be learned through hearing and memory. However, it is the assimilation and inquiry which matters most.

These women knew that the true Gospel transcends our earthly status and categories; it is egalitarian and open to all. Jesus’ and Magdalene’s message is not about heterodoxy but a life changing encounter that is about outward signs of inner workings and a relationship with the living God, not pleasing a tyrant ruler and his ambitious lackeys, who were the true ‘extremists’.

There’s sad irony that Anne Askew had admired Henry as bringer of the True Faith, had hoped for his support in divorcing unsuitable spouses, and yet it was he (via horrible men I’ll not honour by naming) who had her tried and executed.

I see that both Annes were part of a marriage split that led to heresy charges but advanced protestant faith. We might see their advances as monkeys on a greasy pole, slipping more than they climbed, but progress is often like that – especially when portrayed by their detractors. Like Magdalene, their messages continued underground, waiting to shoot again. Under Mary, and in a different way, Elizabeth, the New Learning was suppressed, but people continued to gather whether legal or safe and by the end of the next century, evangelicals were officially free to meet openly. Catholics had to wait longer, but emancipation came, as it always does and will again.

Thank you for joining me

Next time, we meet on August 20^th (same time) for “A Morbid Taste For Bones” – which won’t be morbid at all, but involve a sleuthing monk and a creatively exhumed king.

In September, we think of Elizabeth 1^st, and (truly) me on a special birthday – more anon

Blessings to you all, do contact me (Elspeth) on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Good Night, and hope to see you soon

To mark 111 years since the British Titanic Inquiry

…I have prepared Act II of my play, The Jury In My Mind, as an audio performance. If you’ve purchased the book, you can have free access. I hope to make a full professional recording and live in person performances. Act 1 is already online for a while for everyone

If you’ve purchased my book in any format then email RushbrookBooks@outlook.com and I’ll send you a link

I’m aware that there’s another inquiry regarding the Titanic…I’m still marshalling my thoughts but as ever, am wary of deeper meanings. Is this anniversary and current event with the Titan not coincidence?

Etheldreda of Ely

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/etheldreda-of-ely-at1350

—–Now Updated—–

Welcome to Between The Stools on 25^th June 2023, which isn’t live this month as there’s a special birthday and I’m out celebrating. There’s a 1350^th birthday party for today’s subject.

We’re half way through our History Year with BTS. We’ve been mostly in the 16^th century, whence we will return, but last month we were in 1373 with Julian of Norwich – I’m sure we’ll go back for Margery Kempe, probably an extra post in late September or early October. Thus we’ve been in Norfolk; and in November, we journeyed to 1020 in Suffolk to meet the Abbey of St Edmundsbury and the titular martyr king who inspired it. Now, we’re going our further back in time, to 673, and to the third of the four counties of East Anglia – the part of England which projects like a bum into the North Sea.

In context of our history year: why are these people singled out and admired? Not for the same reasons. Some are warriors; some, martyrs; some theologians; some tacticians; some conquerors. Not all of those are equally admirable in my view. Today we’re with another Queen – not that that status itself makes her more worthy – but it’s usually what she did next that makes her remarkable and a saint.

In context of our femme du jour:

The Land

East Anglia is often called flat, but as any Weedy Cyclist knows, this is inaccurate. We don’t have hills like Dorset and Somerset; we certainly don’t have rocky mountains. We do undulate – I say ‘we’ since it’s my native land and has often, but not exclusively, been my home. Cambridgeshire, the most westerly of the four counties of the region and the only landlocked one, is flat. It is characterised by a feature known as The Fens which extends into West Norfolk: an interminable straight horizon of watery reedy worlds underneath which resides rich dark soil. Until the Fens were drained, East Anglia was semi cut off from the rest of the island; where we’re going today was an island, despite being far from the sea or even an estuary. Its name derives from Elig, Eel Island, and is still known as the Isle Of Ely.

Ely has been my home and it’s a remarkable place. I’ll be there today, with Ethel – we are on familiar terms. Today’s Ely is a small market town of under 20,000 – although it’s almost doubled in 30 years – but it’s proud of its long city status. It is the only rising ground for miles and thus can be seen, on a clear day, for up to 15. Friends told me that as kids they chanted the name of the famous landmark as their family drove towards it. Since it can be viewed for so long, this chant (which I think of whenever this place comes up) would have irritated immensely.

On this one place that could be called a hill, rising out of the marshes, is one of Europe’s longest cathedrals. It is 537ft long – more than double many others – but presides over England’s second smallest cathedral town.

Will you allow me the vanity of quoting from my forthcoming sequel to Parallel Spirals – my first published novel – because this is the best way that I can describe that place of unique atmosphere, especially for those listening/reading internationally.

Today’s Ely cathedral is here because of today’s focus. However, the building we can see (and thus chant about) for all those miles isn’t the one that she had built. That came four hundred years later, and was extended in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, with ceilings of the 15th and 19^th. Ely has a majestic Norman screen front – our best, although half fell in, perhaps when its tower received an octagonal topping. (I’m intrigued by the regular juxtaposition, especially in East Anglia, of polygonal shapes on top of round and square ones in church towers. I’m sure it has sacred geometrical meaning). Ely is famed for the 14^th C central crossing tower built by Alan of Walsingham. It too is octagonal and is an engineering feat since it is suspended by an oak frame in the ceiling and not pillars. I’ve climbed it for a view of those flatlands. From there you can also see the remains of what Ely claims is England’s best preserved collection of monastic buildings, now a school, like a blanket round the cathedral’s feet. This monastery is not the one of Ethel’s time; those black habits which gave the hostry below its name were of the big Italian chain, which founded here in 970; the Norman building of 1083 became a cathedral in 1107.

I’d like you to note that it’s the Normans who begun the extant huge building; that the monks were Benedictine (and that it was only monks ever after, unlike nearby Denny Abbey)…and I want you to compare with what I said about Edmunds’s abbey in November and Durham on my other blog. I’m sensing a pattern…of Benedictine take over of a Saxon era independent monastery, which was consolidated with a huge 12^th C edifice. Does anyone know of more? 

Today, Ely is a place popular with commuters due to the excellent rail links, the use of which demonstrates more of those Fens; it celebrates the eels of its name with an annual festival and they feature in a 20 year old park by the gentle river Ouse. It’s the land of post Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell, whose home is the Tourist Information Centre… I am sure I need to explore him at some point with you. Could Ely, like Norwich, be said to be a place of historically ‘doing different?’ As in the 17^th Century, so the 7^th…?

The Time

Neighbouring Suffolk is celebrated for its Saxon ship burial, Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in the east of the county. There are two on this site, another in a village to the north called Snape famed for concerts in a maltings. It is claimed that the only other known ship burial in the world is in Sweden. I’m intrigued by that connection which clearly begins with V and has horns.

The person thought to be buried in this plateau at Sutton – popularised by the recent film, The Dig, based on John Preston’s novel – is of the same century as today’s focus. He died about 50 years before today’s anniversary and was her great uncle. I’d like to make clear that it isn’t proven that it is King Raedwald of the Eastern Angles whose helmet and other extraordinary treasures lay in an 88 ft boat. I’ll also throw in that nearby Rendlesham, whose royal palace was excavated last year, is renowned as England’s Roswell…and for its ring of military bases in a forest. Another connection to explore?

The England of Etheldreda and Raedwald was divided into seven kingdoms – the era was thus known as the Heptarchy. England as one nation under one ruler did not come for a couple more centuries; and Wales and Scotland were then separate. The Romans had gone two centuries previously, and in their stead came various other often aggressive ‘visitors’ – this time from the north of Europe. Etheldreda’s native and adopted people came from the same stock – the Angles. This is also the era of St Edmundsbury Abbey’s founding – although it wasn’t named that then. King Siegbert and Ethel have something more in common than being neighbours and contemporaries, and from the same family.

I’ve been exploring the Saxon era recently for this and found a theme come up which I wanted to speak of. It is the relationship between Christians and Pagans then – or their modern portrayal. I think this could be very different from today’s Pagans, but the beliefs espoused are a depiction of immature understandings of gods in any faith. Sutton Hoo’s new video is almost evangelistic. The Pagans want to please their gods by showing them their status and wealth. The TV series Valhalla has the Pagans’ gods not knowing their people unless introduced, unlike the Christian God who knows each of his children by name, forms us in the womb, walks with us our whole lives, and welcomes us home at the end of it. He doesn’t need telling that you’re coming or clues to work out how to treat you when you arrive. Jesus speaks of treasures that are destroyed by rust and moth – although the beautiful gold items at Sutton Hoo have done remarkably for 14 centuries – but there’s that adage: you can’t take it with you. The royal house of Wuffings tried to do just that, yet they’re in the British Museum, not Valhalla. Jesus’s treasures are non material, lasting, and entirely transferable. It also seems that the journey to the afterlife – and note that implies that appearing in Valhalla wasn’t instantaneous – required an earthly vessel.

Ship is a link between Ely and Sutton – for this great hulking church, with its 248ft main public space – the nave – named for its nautical resemblance – is oft and aptly known as Ship Across The Fens. (It’s also the title of a song I wrote which features in my novel)

The Sutton Hoo video discussion between two servant women cleaning the shield, sword, belt and shoulder clasps to put into the grave is an interesting contrast between the warring belief systems. The younger woman’s new, imported faith was dangerous. Christianity is thought to have returned to Britain rather than come for the first time at the end of the previous century – only a couple of decades before the ship burial. Thus it was still a new faith in Ethel’s day. The missionary Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory, brought Christianity back to England via Kent and began spreading it by building monasteries and cathedrals up the Roman route from the Continent to the capital and beyond. Like Game of Thrones, there was the old way – the Pagan way – and a gospel preaching equality regardless of earthly status. Hence its danger – and we’ll find that again during our History year in different eras.

However, Christians have often behaved as if their God needed placating too, and here I use pagan with a small P to denote all the many pantheons of gods in other faiths, such as that of Rome. That empire discoloured the Christian message, creating it as a conquering tool. In the TV show Valhalla, the Christians are depicted as despicable hypocrites who preach mercy and brotherhood but then slaughter in the name of Christ. For them, you either kill those of other faiths, or you convert by violence. Baptism is not for them a sign of being cleansed by the Holy Spirit and walking a new – and voluntary – life with Christ, but a sign of acceptance of new rulers. I am staggered that anyone calling themselves Christian could have any clue of the Bible, and especially Jesus, and behave thus, for they continued to behave as characters in the Old Testament, the sort who thought their God was better because he was the one who in a contest could magically make fire…and so that gave license to kill the priests of the other faith (1 Kings 18). Or… as still hanging around in the legend of St George, the pagans came to your side because they were impressed by the feats of the Christian God – as performed by earthly warriors. George became a popular dedication for churches at the time of the Crusades – more confusing conquest with conversion and landgrabbing with soul-winning, this time against a different ‘foe’.

I add that the aforementioned TV series on Netflix depicts the Pagans undergoing unspeakable horrors to placate their gods, couching it as ritual and honour. Thus it shows both faiths committing atrocities and that they both do not understand the real God.

Etheldreda’s time was also that of the Synod of Whitby, told to us by highly biased Bede in his early but influential history chronicle, in which she features. Christianity was (re)spreading in Britain from two separate corners. The one that started in Kent in 597 was the Roman way, from the institution which took over from the military empire of the same name. From the North West came Irish monk Columba, landing at Iona (another abbey and isle still sacred today) in 563, and bringing with him the Celtic version of the faith.

The 664 Church Synod (or council meeting) at the Yorkshire town of Whitby – the abbey that inspired Dracula – was Wilfrid, a leader very influenced by the finery of Rome, the sort of gold that was found at Sutton, versus Hilda, abbess of a double monastery for men and women of the Celtic tradition. Both were in a land called Northumbria; today’s ceremonial county of Northumberland partly covers its vast former scope. Lower Scotland and Cumbria – the West side of England’s North – and Yorkshire were part of this strongly evocative kingdom, often still associated with this era. It’s wild and craggy – quite unlike Ely – and although industrialised and urbanised it still contains a special space which you might encounter at Lindisfarne (another holy island) or Durham, which is also a rising in hill and almost an isle.

The question was: which path would the Church here follow? Rome’s way, with rules and rubies and robes, or the simpler, perhaps austere way of the Celts which seems (I like to think) to have melded with the native extant earth religions rather than trying to stamp them out.

Would we go the way of Hild(a) of Hartlepool, or Wilfrid of Ripon and York?

I gained a strong impression against Wilfrid, especially from the novels about Cuthbert by Katherine Tiernan, but also conversations with other history lovers. Wilfrid appears to be worldly and ambitious and destructive. Even a Yorkshire newspaper commenting on his special anniversary this year calls him a controversial saint.

The established church, despite the Reformation, is still the way that Synod decided, although there’s much renewed clamour for the other. And that’s relevant to our Woman of The [Half] Hour.

The Woman

Hilda had something in common with Etheldreda, other than being related by marriage.

What wonderful names the Saxons had! This lady had three – no, I’m not referring to her middle names. Ethel was also known as Aethythryth or Audrey, which is why Ethel can apparently be a diminutive of Audrey. And the adjective ‘tawdry’ comes from a corruption of St Audrey’s day, and the tacky low quality trinkets people bought at her feast day fairs.

She lived c636-79: interestingly, although her years are sometimes asserted as facts, she’s once again someone famous whose dates are approximate.

Etheldreda also had a sister Ethel – Ethelburga (there are male Ethel—s of the era too), and another called Sexburga. All were queens, abbesses and saints.

Ely cathedral’s website tells the story quite differently to other sources. For them, the family of the Ethel/burgas was one of devout Christians in difficult pagan times – they don’t give pagans a capital P. Their father was King Anna. Yes, a male Anna. A biographical aside: when a child, I played with plastic interlocking shapes and created a horned man that I called Viking Anna. And despite the name Anna being well known to me as a female one, I was adamant that this Viking, who I saw as a chieftain if not regal, was a man. Twenty years on, browsing Ipswich Museum [which is closed for alarming refurbishments], I discovered that there had been a Viking Anna of East Anglia. I felt vindicated…but why did I sense him, and why is he significant?

Anna married his virtuous daughter off twice, for political reasons. She was soon widowed of Tondbert, a prince or chieftain depending on who you ask, also from the West of Anglia. It is his wedding gift of land that allowed Etheldreda to settle in Ely later. She had refused to consummate this marriage, but was married again to a very young Northumbrian prince, Egfrid. He agreed to this condition – until he got older and became the regional king (thus making Etheldreda queen). Interesting use of words as to what comes next…

Did he want a ‘normal marriage’ or did he pursue Etheldreda to rape her and claim her as property? The fact she fled into a monastery, first in Northumbria and then to the land she owned in Ely suggests coercion and the need for sanctuary.

Who counselled Etheldreda to leave her husband? Who was her spiritual companion as well as friend of the Northumbrian king, whence he was bishop? Oh, it’s Wilfrid. This was the point of the story where I wondered – will I like this woman?

A history site – not connected to Ely cathedral or hagiography – suggests that the many sainted daughters of King Anna was more about accolades for his large family – there were other children – than ‘piety’. It was kind of badge getting and mythmaking.

It wasn’t uncommon for aristocrats to found religious houses. Siegbert had entered one after abdicating at what became Bury St Edmunds. He was sainted but also martyred in battle. What did Etheldreda do?

It seems she simply was a good woman. (Isn’t simply being good enough?) The remarkable things came, as they often did, posthumously. She died of a neck tumour, but this was seen in some accounts as a sign of vanity for her regal necklaces, which she accepted (illness is never a punishment!!) but she was healed of it after lying in her coffin and of course found uncorrupted…. and then the excuse for a super shrine to get pilgrims to come to see and pay towards… even if they had to endure the marshes by boat to do so.

I observed that Ely cathedral has stood in as a palace of the court of a woman who is assured and radiant (in the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age), in contrast to that of Lady Macbeth.

Does the cathedral of Etheldreda still feel like the space of a woman, or a feminine space? My gut is not. I note that despite the fuss of this weekend, that the cathedral is now St Peter’s.

Was she good? Or like her spiritual counsellor, just a badge to collector as much as those pilgrims?

As with Edmund, there is an area called The Liberty of St Etheldreda (this address was inspirational to me). Does she bring us liberation, as she liberated herself from her marriage?

I’ll find out today and will report if there’s more to this story.

Do comment if you know the story of Etheldreda and her family (or want to stick up for Wilfrid)

or would like to reach out for prayer, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Speaking of prayer, let’s end with one

If you’re interested in meeting in person, do let me know

Next time is Magdalene Sunday on July 23rd and about people to definitely (I think) learn from and admire: we’re back to the 16^th Century and three women, two we’ve met already this year. (8pm BST)

Do join me then – blessings to you all and goodnight

——————–

Post Party Update:

I learned little from my sojourn to Ely. I liked the story of Etheldreda’s sprouting staff – also in the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, and an inversion of the Burning Bush. It’s a powerful symbol of claiming ground, setting an intention, and then it flowering. I took interest in the depictions of Ethel in the city. There’s the one I’ve used from this year’s brochure by Lisa Gifford – note the octagon, which came 600 years later. My favourite was in the Babylon gallery – yes, I’ve been to Babylon and its rivers (cue Boney M) by Kristin VG Bailey. It was both a traditional icon style and a modern print. (I cannot find a link). Sometimes, Etheldreda has a crown; sometimes a staff which distinctly looks like a bishop’s crook, appropriate as an abbess, although I’ve heard this downgraded to a simple but miraculous staff. (Perhaps not all like women leaders of the church – we do still have the bishop of Richborough for those Anglicans who don’t approve of female vicars!!). Audrey  often seems rather Marian – blue dress, white headcover, and of course, virginal. She sometimes holds a church, but other times, a book – more discomfort at a woman foundress? (although they get two saint’s days out of her a year). The information about Etheldreda was in the darkest part of the cathedral; I reiterate my remark that it’s not a light and maternal space – save the Lady Chapel. In the very Gothic retrochoir were a few boards telling her story, skipping the raping husband and instead focussing on Audrey’s pious leanings, wanting to commit to nunhood at an early age. A crowd gathered for Ethel around the spot she was buried – still marked, sans shrine; I felt that despite the pompous organ and simple ditty that we raised the energy of that heavy space.

Etheldreda events continue – if I am able to get to more (or find out about Wilfrid) I’ll let you know – and if you get to any, let me know.

I did hear about Wilfrid in the abbey which Etheldreda made possible: Hexham in Northumbria. Ah, so is that why Wilfrid encouraged her?  because as Queen, land giving was in her gift and Wilfrid wanted to start playing monolopy with churches instead of hotels? I asked a guide atHexham if he wanted to stick up for Wilfrid but he too was wary of this supposed saint. There was a depiction of Etheldreda who looked very Joan of Arc…yet it seems at odds with her story and the picture I’ve formed.

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Julian 650 follow up 1: Parallel Shewings

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/julian-650-follow-up-1

Above:

Jo, Julian

Neale, Joni

Notes

There is an obvious segue between the coronation and Julian (her words on the screen of annointing)

Ire and irony of presitigious academics taking over the unlettered simple woman

I reject the notion that Julian is lady in the peerage sense

Julian’s commandeered by certain Christians, but her loving Mother God speak more widely

Her book originally had no ‘divine’ in the title

Some corrections from my sermon of 7th: she wrote in middle, not old English

Did visitors and servants touch her through her windows?

Was her cell so severe?

Which St Julian was the church named after?

Comment on the statue on Norwich cathedral (in above picture)

Reprise of my 2014 lecture

Julian and Modern Mystics: Jo Dunning, Joni Eareckson Tada and Neale Donald Walsch

600 years and 1000 miles apart

What three living American writer and/or speakers have in common with Julian

Can Julian be overlaid with the law of attraction? Julian speaks of can, willing and doing as parts of the trinity: isn’t that thought, word and action?

For each, suffering started their spiritual journey and ministry

Jo and Julian specifically asked for an experience; Joni certainly did not

Some of Julian’s ideas, about oneness and God’s will for example, sound like Jo and Neale

Suffering is not punishment nor about humbling (as Joni thought) but growth

God does not blame us

Discrepancy between the church’s teaching and God’sin all but Joni

Devil…sin…evil…imagery

Did they add to the Good Book with their revealed writing?

Julian has a great deal of autonomy, but Neale is dictated didactic dialectics

Why Julian now…or at all?

More thoughts coming

What does Julian mean to you? Do tell me

[Sorry for the snuffly voice and delay in the follow up]