Monday 23 March 2015

Had Richard III won at Bosworth, would England now be Catholic?

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Yesterday King Richard III was given, as he would have wanted, a Catholic Requiem Mass, his body having been discovered under a car park in Leicester, not far from where he died on Bosworth field. His body was taken to the church where he will be buried this week, the procession being attended by thousands. As one man said,
You don’t go to a king’s funeral every day.
Richard III will be buried in a Church of England church, despite having been a Catholic. He was given a Requiem Mass, naturally, by the Catholic Church but his funeral (actually reinterment, because he was given a very perfunctory funeral in 1485) should have been Catholic, sung and in Latin.

Had he won at Bosworth, Henry VII's son, Henry VIII, would not have been king. Would England still be Catholic?

I'm glad that the fact that Richard III was a child murderer and usurper does not prevent his receiving royal honours. There is a majesty doth hedge a king, even one who kills a king. When I was a boy, King Edward V, the boy-king whom Richard had murdered, was my favourite king and he still is, poor boy.

Thank God the monarchy and the class system do something to keep England, or rather Great Britain, united - I wish residual Christianity did, but I am not sure it does.


Archaeologists are to start digging for another of Britain’s ‘lost’ kings, King Stephen, under a school playing field in one of England's most beautiful towns, Faversham in Kent. Henry I is also missing..


Stephen was always another one of my favourite kings when I was a young boy. No idea why. I learnt about them all aged four from a wonderful book written between the Golden and Diamond Jubilees which my father gave me and which his father had bought him second-hand called The Royal portrait Gallery. So I have them all fixed in my mind with their portraits. It was exactly the sort of thing Sellars and Yeatman lampooned in 1066 and All That.
HENRY I was famous for his handwriting and was therefore generally called Henry Beau-geste. He was extremely fond of his son William, who was, however, drowned in the White City. Henry tried to console himself for his loss by eating a surfeit of palfreys. This was a Bad Thing since he died of it and never smiled again.
Do people today even get those jokes? Shakes head wistfully.

15 comments:

  1. To avoid a little triumphalism by the Italian Misson to the Irish, I would point out that His late Majesty was English. He was a member of the English church. He will be buried in an English cathedral according to English rites. That at some stage one of his successors denied the authority of a foreign bishop and Prince is an irrelevance. Despite developments on this island, it remains the English (catholic) church. Thus all done in order.

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    1. St. Augustine said many churches claim to be Catholic but when a stranger comes to a town and inquires where the Catholic Church is everyone knows where to direct him.

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  2. My favourite King of the England, Scotland and Ireland - George IV (based on what he left behind). Paul M

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    1. As a boy of five my favourite after King Edward V was King William IV. I also liked St. Edmund of East Anglia whom I chose as my patron when I was confirmed (but now I doubt how saintly the warrior kings saints were).

      Why King George IV? He had taste, I suppose.

      Did you know that had Napoleon invaded George III intended to take command of the army, with Prinny as second in command? Makes you think, doesn't it? (And yet many people, like Andrew Roberts, admire Napoleon.)

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  3. Richard 111
    this 'he was a Catholic so he should have a catholic burial' stuff misses the point about monarchy which is to separate the role from the person occupying it. The monarch is the head of the Anglican Church so we pay the highest respect we can to Richard 111 by according him a burial according to the rights of our church. As a monarch he was one of us. As a catholic, good or bad is surely for God to decide, he was one of them !

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    1. I don't think God is concerned with the tyranny of small differences.

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  4. I remember Christopher Lee as Dracula contemptuously saying to Peter Cushing (after a bit of retro vade Satane) "It always sounds so much better in Latin, and I thought yes, yes it does.

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  5. King Stephen was mentioned in this week's 'Moral Maze' 'How far the great, the powerful and the famous are to be judged the same way as the rest of us' Referring mostly to Richard III and mentioning Jeremy Clarkson. One guest said 'For example if this was the interment of an obscure king, take for example King Stephen I of whom I suspect few people have heard and even fewer people are interested, there wouldn't be this kind of excitement because he was monumentally boring in the public image'. So no surprise when I tell you the guest's name - Melanie Phillips.
    Sandra

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    1. She sounds like 1066 and All That on 'Henry III a nondescript king'.

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  6. I have also always liked Stephen. He suffered a seriously bad press. Interestingly, the monarch responsible for the two worst presses any other kings received, Stephen and John, was Henry II.

    But he was liked and respected by his contemporaries. We have the jury system as a legacy of Henry II's attempt to wipe out Stephen's reign. Juries were originally convened during land disputes that resulted from the period of civil war, to agree how the land had been disposed at the time of Henry I and reinstate that. Henry also came up with the writ of novel disseisin, which would be a good remedy today to the problems of squatting and traveller camps.

    Stephen ought to be the hero of limited government advocates. He basically rubbed along with most people (except Matilda and her allies), dispensed justice as monarchs were supposed to pre-Henry II, and didn't attempt any grand schemes.

    Peter Risdon

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    1. I thought you'd be a Harold II man. Witan and traditional Anglo-Saxon liberties and all that Whig stuff.

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    2. Oddly, Henry II is my favourite king. But Stephen was a good chap I think. This is a good recent-ish (2002) biography of him by Donald Matthew I'd recommend strongly. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=d_Uw7fhx82cC&printsec=frontcover&dq=king+stephen&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GwkYVZHrKrLd7Qa374DICg&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=king%20stephen&f=false

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    3. I remember AJP Taylor dismissed the suggestion that Henry V was the best ruler England ever had and said he was probably about as good as Ramsay MacDonald. My father could do an impersonation of Ramsay MacDonald but my father was frightfully old when I was born and therefore I am still young.

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  7. King Henry I suffered one of my favourite monarchical deaths - 'surfeit of lampreys'. I thought he was buried at Reading Abbey? The Abbey is today ruins but I believe the King was buried in front of the alter, so surely we'd have a reasonably good idea of whereabouts his tomb lies? Andrew S

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