Learning Something New Every Day! What, Yet Again? Queen Victoria's Neutrality!

The Son Rise Morning Show will be airing a "best-of" program on Monday, May 25, Memorial Day, so I've moved my "Learning Something New Every Day" post up. On Tuesday, May 26, I'll post on Saint Philip Neri and Saint John Henry Newman. 

On Monday, June 1, we'll start a new series on the Son Rise Morning Show, with a topic Anna Mitchell suggested to me. More to come on that next week!

I saw a story about Queen Victoria's government not taking any side the U.S. Civil War and looked into the topic further. There is a connection to my second "Learning Something New Every Day" story because the U.S. Minister to the Court of Saint James in the United Kingdom during the Civil War era was Henry Adams's father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr. Henry was with his father in England.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman's "A Dangerous Neutrality" begins where Susan Hanssen's article about Henry Adams in 1912 began, with plans for a trans-Atlantic journey:

Charles Francis Adams, distinguished scion of Boston and son of John Quincy Adams, had heard the stories since childhood about his father’s and grandfather’s long, frightening trip to France in 1778. The surging, implacable Atlantic had tried to drown the emissaries even before their mission began. Now, in May 1861, it took little more than a week to cross the pond, and it was Charles’s turn to duel England as his country’s representative in London.

He had little time to lose; a major diplomatic crisis was unfolding. After the fall of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln blockaded the 3,000-mile coastline between Virginia and Texas. Foreign ships could no longer enter any port in the South, upon penalty of forfeiting both ships and cargo if caught. Yet Lincoln had not anticipated what to do if the Europeans objected to this interference of their profitable trade. And they did.

While Adams was en route, the United Kingdom declared neutrality with the result that the nation would trade with both the United States of America and the Southern states, under the name of the Confederate States of America:

Queen Victoria proclaimed neutrality in the American Civil War on the advice of her ministers. At a stroke, she granted parity to the Confederacy and the United States. Each belligerent could contract for munitions in English ports, sell goods confiscated from their enemy and purchase ships as long as they were not obviously outfitted for war.

The rest of article recounts different reactions to this neutrality in newspapers. Many in the United States of America were more than a little angry with the UK and accused it of hypocrisy over the issue of slavery. Hoffman describes Adams's reaction once he had arrived in England:

Charles Francis Adams reacted to England’s Neutrality Proclamation with uncanny calm. Renowned for his polite, stiffly formal manners, he adopted the cool tone set by Lord John Russell. It allowed him to relay unpleasant tidings, Adams observed, in “the most indifferent, businesslike, mechanical way, as if it was a matter of course and not particularly important.”

The unrecognized Confederate States of America nevertheless sent envoys seeking more than trade, according to this "story of diplomacy" from The National Museum of American Diplomacy, "The Trent Affair: Diplomacy, Britain, and the American Civil War":

Confederates, however, rejoiced in the news. The declaration was an opening to lobby European powers for full recognition. Recognition would allow the Confederates to borrow from international lenders to fund the war. Because of this, sending diplomatic envoys to Britain and France became a top priority for southern ambitions.

This particular diplomatic crisis for Charles Francis Adams came when a ship of the United States fired upon a British ship ("two shots across the bow") to seize two envoys from the CSA. Queen Victoria's government was not amused:

The British were furious at the United States for blatantly disrespecting their sovereignty. Prime Minister Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Earl Russell erupted in a fury at a cabinet meeting. Palmerston shouted, “I don’t know whether you are going to stand this, but I’ll be damned if I do!”

All Charles Francis Adams could do was send letters to Secretary Seward, letting him know of the hot temperature in London. Unable to speak on behalf of the U.S. government without instructions from Seward, Adams could only wait, watch, and avoid meetings with Lord Russell.

With counsel from the deathly-ill Prince Consort, the British demanded an apology and that the two envoys from the South, James Mason and John Slidell, be released to a British ship and allowed to proceed to England. While the apology the Queen's government received was couched mostly as disavowing Wilkes's actions, Mason and Slidell did proceed to England. 

As for Wilkes, he was placed on the retirement list at the end of the year, but later returned to service. While he was known as "a distinguished explorer, author, and naval officer"[33], "he also had a reputation as a stubborn, overzealous, impulsive, and sometimes insubordinate officer".[34] Treasury officer George Harrington had warned [Secretary of State] Seward about Wilkes: "He will give us trouble. He has a superabundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment. When he commanded his great exploring mission he court-martialed nearly all his officers; he alone was right, everybody else was wrong."[35] He had taken a decision--entirely on his own--in this case that provoked a diplomatic, financial, and almost a military crisis (the British had troops in Canada, of course).

Cooler heads like Adams and even Prince Albert prevailed, however. 

Image Credit (Public Domain): Charles Francis Adams, 1861

Image Credit (Public Domain): Queen Victoria, 1860

Preview: 2025 Anniversaries: Fisher and More, Canonized

Ninety years ago, Pope Pius XI presided over the canonizations of John Cardinal Fisher and Sir Thomas More in Vatican City on May 19, 1935. It's important to note that Pope Pius XI beatified many other martyrs from the English Reformation and Recusant era (136 on December 15, 1929, witnessed by G.K. Chesterton!) and canonized several other significant men and women during his pontificate (1922-1939): Saints Therese of Lisieux, John Eudes, John Vianney, Robert Bellarmine, Bernadette Soubirous, and the North American/Canadian Jesuit martyrs.

So we'll remember this anniversary on Monday, June 16 on the Son Rise Morning Show. So I'll be on the air at the usual time at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Before we go any further, you have to see this brief video of how men risked life and limb to illuminate Saint Peter's Basilica for the canonization Mass celebrated inside!!

Pope Pius XI spoke of Fisher and More in his homily as being: 

the bright champions and the glory of their nation, were given to the Christian people, in the words of the prophet Jeremias, “as a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass.” Therefore they could not be shaken by the fallacies of heretics, nor frightened by the threats of the powerful. They were, so to speak, the leaders and chieftains of that illustrious band of men who, from all classes of the people and from every part of Great Britain, resisted the new errors with unflinching spirit, and in shedding their blood, testified their loyal devotedness to the Holy See.

Of Saint John Fisher, he contrasted the Cardinal Bishop's pastoral gentleness with his doctrinal and moral zeal:

Nevertheless, whilst he was meek and affable towards the afflicted and the suffering, whenever there was question of defending the integrity of faith and morals, like a second Precursor of the Lord, in whose name he gloried, he was not afraid to proclaim the truth openly, and to defend by every means in his power the divine teachings of the Church. You are well aware, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Sons, of the reason why John Fisher was called in judgment and obliged to undergo the supreme test of martyrdom. It was because of his courageous determination to defend the sacred bond of Christian marriage—a bond indissoluble for all, even for those who wear the royal diadem—and to vindicate the Primacy with which the Roman Pontiffs are invested by divine command.

Of the layman, Thomas More, he praised the continuity of his life and death:

Endowed with the keenest of minds and supreme versatility in every kind of knowledge, he enjoyed such esteem and favour among his fellow-citizens that he was soon able to reach the highest grades of public office. But he was no less distinguished for his desire of Christian perfection and his zeal for the salvation of souls. Of this we have testimony in the ardour of his prayer, in the fervour with which he recited, whenever he could, even the Canonical Hours, in the practice of those penances by which he kept his body in subjection, and finally in the numerous and renowned accomplishments of both the spoken and the written word which he achieved for the defence of the Catholic faith and for the safeguarding of Christian morality.

A strong and courageous spirit, like John Fisher, when he saw that the doctrines of the Church were gravely endangered, he knew how to despise resolutely the flattery of human respect, how to resist, in accordance with his duty, the supreme head of the State when there was question of things commanded by God and the Church, and how to renounce with dignity the high office with which he was invested. It was for these motives that he too was imprisoned, nor could the tears of his wife and children make him swerve from the path of truth and virtue.

Of course, this event was not without controversy: in Great Britain, King George V and Queen Mary were celebrating their Silver Jubilee; Catholics had just been granted more rights in 1929--being allowed to include bequests in their last wills and testaments for Masses said after their deaths for example--and this raising of two Englishmen who had defied their King and Parliament could raise some hackles. 

Arthur Cardinal Hinsley, the Archbishop of Westminster (1935-1943) even "asked the British Minister to the Holy See, Sir Charles Wingfield whether it would be possible for the king to send a special mission to the canonisation ceremony to highlight the special patriotic loyalty of the English and Welsh Catholic community" according to Moloney, Thomas, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: the Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1938–1943, (London, 1985), p. 41." which could be considered rather bold!

But King George V, like his father Edward VII before him, had wanted the anti-Catholic denunciations to be removed from the Parliamentary/Coronation Oath he was required to make, and they were, in the "Act to alter the form of the Declaration required to be made by the Sovereign on Accession" in 1910, so perhaps he was not offended at all. But unlike the canonization of Saint John Henry Newman, which then Prince Charles attended, I found no indication that any official delegation attended in 1935.

You might recall that when Pope Benedict XVI made his state visit to Scotland and England during which he beatified John Henry Newman, there was a diplomatic incident, when an internal memo got out: 

The memo suggested that Pope Benedict XVI, during his visit, could launch a range of branded condoms, visit an abortion clinic, bless a gay marriage and apologise for the Spanish Armada.[3] The cover note to the memo read "Please protect; these should not be shared externally. The 'ideal visit' paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas."

Perhaps not all brainstorming sessions should be documented. The government apologized, of course.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Saint Thomas More, pray for us! 

Note that 25 years ago, Pope Saint John Paul II declared St. Thomas More Patron of Statesmen and Politicians (October 31, 2000). The anniversaries just keep coming! And in my research for this post I found this article about St. Thomas More as one of the intercessors for Opus Dei!

Image Source (Public Domain): Portrait of King/Emperor George V by Arthur Stockdale Cope, 1933

The Protestant Throckmorton

Sir Nicholas Throckmorton died on February 12, 1571; he was a survivor of the Tudor succession, restored to favor under Mary I in spite of his initial support of Lady Jane Grey--who was executed on February 12 in 1554--and suspicion of his involvement in the Wyatt Rebellion. According to the Dictionary of National Biography:

diplomatist, born in 1515, was fourth of the eight sons of Sir George Throckmorton of Coughton, Warwickshire. His grandfather, Sir Robert Throckmorton (son of Thomas, and grandson of Sir John Throckmorton [q. v.]), was a privy councillor under Henry VII, and died in 1519 while on a pilgrimage to Palestine. His mother was Katharine, daughter of Sir Nicholas, lord Vaux of Harrowden, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Henry, lord Fitzhugh, and widow of Sir William Parr, K.G. She was thus aunt by marriage to Queen Catherine Parr, and Sir Nicholas claimed the queen as his first cousin. His father, Sir George, incurred, owing to some local topic of dispute, the ill-will of Cromwell, whose manor of Oversley adjoined that of Coughton. Early in 1540 Cromwell contrived to have his neighbour imprisoned on a charge of denying Henry VIII's supremacy, but Lady Throckmorton's niece, Catherine Parr, used her influence with the king to procure Sir George's release. Sir George was one of the chief witnesses against Cromwell at his trial, which took place in the same year, and was consulted by Henry VIII in the course of the proceedings. After Cromwell's fall Sir George purchased Cromwell's forfeited manor of Oversley. He was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1526 and 1546, and built the great gatehouse at Coughton. He died soon after Queen Mary's accession. Sir Robert Throckmorton (d. 1570), Sir George's eldest son and successor in the Coughton estate, was succeeded by his son Thomas (d. 1614), who, as a staunch catholic, suffered much persecution and loss of property during Elizabeth's reign. Thomas Throckmorton's grandson Robert was a devoted royalist, and was created a baronet on 1 Sept. 1642. The baronetcy is still held by a descendant.

As for Nicholas, the fourth son, he was a Protestant:

Nicholas was chiefly brought up by his mother's brother-in-law, Lord Parr. In youth he served as page to the Duke of Richmond, and probably went to Paris with his master in 1532. With two brothers he joined the household of his family connection, Catherine Parr, soon after her marriage to Henry VIII in July 1543. Unlike other members of his family, he accepted the reformed faith of his mistress, and remained a sturdy protestant till his death. He and two brothers were present as sympathising spectators at the execution of Anne Askew, the protestant martyr, in 1546 (Narratives of the Reformation, Camden Soc. pp. 41–2).

Throckmorton entered public life as M.P. for Malden in 1545, and sat in the House of Commons almost continuously till 1567. The accession of Edward VI was favourable to his fortunes. With the king's religious sentiment he was in thorough sympathy, and Edward liked him personally. . . .

Although he was Protestant, he eventually sided with the Catholic Mary instead of the Protestant Jane:

Throckmorton's signature was appended to the letters patent of 7 June 1553 which limited the succession of the crown to Lady Jane Grey and her descendants (Chronicle of Queen Jane, p. 100). Immediately after Edward's death and Lady Jane's accession, Throckmorton's wife acted by way of deputy for Lady Jane as godmother of a son of Edward Underhill, the ‘Hot-Gospeller,’ at his christening in the Tower of London (19 July 1553); the boy was named Guilford after Lady Jane's husband (Narratives of the Reformation, p. 153). On the same day Mary was generally proclaimed queen. Throckmorton is reported to have been at the moment at Northampton, and when Sir Thomas Tresham formally declared for Mary there, he is said to have made a protest in Lady Jane's favour, which exposed him to personal risk at the townspeople's hands (Chron. of Queen Jane, p. 12). But Throckmorton's devotion to Lady Jane was more specious than real, and he had no intention of forfeiting the goodwill of her rival Mary. He was credited by his friends with having taken a step of the first importance to Mary's welfare on the very day of Edward VI's death by sending her London goldsmith to her at Hoddesdon to apprise her of the loss of her brother, and to warn her of the danger that threatened her if she fell into the clutches of the Duke of Northumberland (Legend of Throckmorton, vv. 111 et seq.; cf.Goodman's Life and Times, i. 117). On Mary's arrival in London she showed no resentment at Throckmorton's dalliance with Lady Jane's pretensions, and he sat as member for Old Sarum in her first parliament of October–December 1553.

But he was suspected of involvement in the Wyatt Plot and spent some time in the Tower of London, but was acquitted at trial by the jury! That's extraordinary in the history of treason trials, but he had defended himself well--and both he and the jury were still imprisoned after the verdict.

When Mary died and Elizabeth became queen, Throckmorton began diplomatic contacts with Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and Queen of France (briefly):

Elizabeth's accession to the throne opened to him a career of political activity. He was at once appointed chief butler and chamberlain of the exchequer, and was elected M.P. for Lyme Regis on 2 Jan. 1558–9. In the following May the more important office of ambassador to France was bestowed on him (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom., 1547–80, p. 128). On 9 Jan. 1559–60 the queen signed instructions in which he was directed to protest against the assumption of the arms of England by Francis II, who had married Mary Queen of Scots on 24 April 1558, and had ascended the French throne on 10 July 1559 (Hatfield MSS. i. 165–7; State Papers, Foreign, 1559–60, No. 557). Francis died on 5 Dec. 1560, and Throckmorton was much occupied in the weeks that followed in seeking to induce Queen Mary to forego ‘the style and title of sovereign of England,’ and to postpone her assumption of her sovereignty in Scotland. Throckmorton had many audiences of her, and acknowledged her fascination. They corresponded on friendly terms, and despite differences in their religious and political opinions, he thenceforth did whatever he could to serve her, consistently with his duty to his country (cf. Labanoff, Lettres de Marie Stuart, i. 94, 128). He now succeeded in reconciling Elizabeth to the prospect of Queen Mary's settlement in Scotland. But he endeavoured to persuade Mary to tolerate protestantism among her subjects, and did not allow his personal regard for her to diminish his zeal for his own creed. The Venetian ambassador in France described him (3 July 1561) as ‘the most cruel adversary that the catholic religion has in England’ (Cal. Venetian State Papers, 1558–80, p. 333). He showed every mark of hostility to the Guises and of sympathy with the Huguenots, and urged Elizabeth to ally herself publicly and without delay with the Huguenots in France and the reformers in Scotland. Little heed was paid to his proposals.

As you read the rest of the biography, you might notice that Throckmorton was not always a successful diplomat. One problem he had was that Elizabeth I's directions were not always clear, and sometimes even contradictory. He fell out of her graces one last time over Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk's idea of marrying the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots:

Throckmorton thenceforth suffered acutely from a sense of disappointment. His health failed during 1568, but he maintained friendly relations with Cecil, to whom he wrote from Fulham on 2 Sept. 1568 that he proposed to kill a buck at Cecil's house at Mortlake. He had long favoured the proposal to wed Queen Mary to the Duke of Norfolk, and he was consequently suspected next year of sympathy with the rebellion of northern catholics in Queen Mary's behalf. In September 1569 he was imprisoned in Windsor Castle, but he was soon released and no further proceedings were taken against him. He died in London on 12 Feb. 1570–1. . . . Throckmorton was buried on the south side of the chancel in St. Catherine Cree Church in the city of London.

Image Credit at top: Throckmorton's monument in St. Katherine Cree. Note the bottom of the the portrait of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury above the tomb in this picture (he was Bishop of London when he consecrated the rebuilt church in 1631).

"England's Forgotten Muslim History"

Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, has written a book that gets the usual UK/USA treatment as to title and cover. In the UK his book is titled This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. In the USA, it's The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam. The U.K. book description:

In 1570, when it became clear she would never be gathered into the Catholic fold, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. On the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', this marked the beginning of an extraordinary English alignment with the Muslim powers who were fighting Catholic Spain in the Mediterranean, and of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from the kings of Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakesh. By the late 1580s hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elizabethan merchants, diplomats, sailors, artisans and privateers were plying their trade from Morocco to Persia.

These included the resourceful mercer Anthony Jenkinson who met both Süleyman the Magnificent and the Persian Shah Tahmasp in the 1560s, William Harborne, the Norfolk merchant who became the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1582 and the adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley, who spent much of 1600 at the court of Shah Abbas the Great. The previous year, remarkably, Elizabeth sent the Lancastrian blacksmith Thomas Dallam to the Ottoman capital to play his clockwork organ in front of Sultan Mehmed. The awareness of Islam which these Englishmen brought home found its way into many of the great cultural productions of the day, including most famously Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice. The year after Dallam's expedition the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Mohammed al-Annuri, spent six months in London with his entourage. Shakespeare wrote Othello six months later.

This Orient Isle shows that England's relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England. It is a startlingly unfamiliar picture of part of our national and international history.

Writing for The New York Times before the book comes out in the USA, Brotton summarizes his argument:

In the 1580s she signed commercial agreements with the Ottomans that would last over 300 years, granting her merchants free commercial access to Ottoman lands. She made a similar alliance with Morocco, with the tacit promise of military support against Spain.

As money poured in, Elizabeth began writing letters to her Muslim counterparts, extolling the benefits of reciprocal trade. She wrote as a supplicant, calling Murad “the most mighty ruler of the kingdom of Turkey, sole and above all, and most sovereign monarch of the East Empire.” She also played on their mutual hostility to Catholicism, describing herself as “the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries.” Like Muslims, Protestants rejected the worship of icons, and celebrated the unmediated word of God, while Catholics favored priestly intercession. She deftly exploited the Catholic conflation of Protestants and Muslims as two sides of the same heretical coin.

The ploy worked. Thousands of English traders crossed many of today’s no-go regions, like Aleppo in Syria, and Mosul in Iraq. They were far safer than they would have been on an equivalent journey through Catholic Europe, where they risked falling into the hands of the Inquisition.

The Ottoman authorities saw their ability to absorb people of all faiths as a sign of power, not weakness, and observed the Protestant-Catholic conflicts of the time with detached bemusement. Some Englishmen even converted to Islam. A few, like Samson Rowlie, a Norfolk merchant who became Hassan Aga, chief treasurer to Algiers, were forced. Others did so of their own volition, perhaps seeing Islam as a better bet than the precarious new Protestant faith. . . .

Elizabeth’s Islamic policy held off a Catholic invasion, transformed English taste and established a new model for joint stock investment that would eventually finance the Virginia Company, which founded the first permanent North American colony.Read the rest there.

Writing for The Catholic Herald, however, Francois Soyer, associate professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, sees some problems with Brotton's thesis:

England’s ties with the Muslim Ottoman Empire did indeed make an impact on military events but in a very different way. They must be studied within the wider background of diplomatic and military developments elsewhere in Europe, the Mediterranean and even the Middle East. . . .

For Philip II of Spain, the heretical Protestants in Northern Europe came to dominate all other issues: the Calvinist rebels in the Netherlands, their English allies, and the Protestants in France posed a danger to the Catholic Church and Philip’s own authority.

Similarly, the primary threat for the Sunni Ottoman Sultan became the Shiite Safavid dynasty in Persia (modern-day Iran). As Shiites, the Safavids challenged the theological legitimacy of the Sultan in the Islamic world and threatened the Ottoman heartlands in Anatolia. The Ottomans initiated a conflict against the Safavids in 1578 (until 1590) and the rivalry between both Muslim dynasties continued into the seventeenth century. Both the superpowers of the age had effectively decided that the enemies within their faith represented a great threat than the infidel.

It is therefore hard to see how the ties Elizabeth forged with the Ottoman played any role in “holding off a Catholic invasion”. Indeed, in this respect her strategy could be seen as having been a singular failure. When the Armada sailed against England in 1588, it comprised a number of ships that were redeployed from Mediterranean squadrons due to the absence of an Ottoman threat. The galleass La Girona, which sank off Country Antrim with tremendous loss of life in October 1588, was just one of these redeployed galleys and galleasses that were more suited to naval warfare in the Mediterranean than the North Atlantic.

The Ottoman Sultan and his officials may well have welcomed English envoys and trade links and made pleasing diplomatic noises. But they offered no real military help. Diplomatic relations in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean were often moulded by a brutal realpolitik in which expediency trumped religious loyalties: my enemy’s enemy was my friend, whether or not he was an infidel. Elizabeth wasn’t the first European monarch to seek a Muslim ally (the French Kings had previously sought Ottoman help against the Habsburgs); she wasn’t the last, either (even Philip III of Spain would later seek to cultivate relations with the Safavids to counter any Ottoman threat).

Read the rest there.

Britain and the Holy See: 1982 to 2012

In 2012, Britain and the Holy See celebrated 30 years of uninterrupted diplomatic relations with a conference at the Venerable English College in Rome. According to a Catholic News Agency article at the time:

Today [March  30, 2012] the United Kingdom marked 30 years of full diplomatic relations with the Holy See with a one-day conference in Rome.

During his introductory remarks on March 30, U.K. Ambassador Nigel Baker called 1982 “a red-letter year in the relationship between Britain and the Holy See.”
 
The year “saw the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations at ambassadorial level and the United Kingdom, for the first time, welcomed a reigning Pontiff – Blessed Pope John Paul II – to its shores.”

The day-long event, which was hosted by Rome’s Venerable English College, was titled “Britain and the Holy See: A Celebration of 1982 and the Wider Relationship.” With the assistance of numerous contributors, it attempted to review the events of 30 years ago and assess their historical, diplomatic and ecumenical impact.

Vatican Radio recently talked to Nigel Baker, the current U.K. ambassador to the Holy See, about the publication of the proceedings of that 2012 conference:

Celebrating Britain’s relations with the Holy See: that’s the goal of a glossy new publication bringing together contributions from Catholics and Anglicans, clerics and diplomats, professors, historians and ecumenical experts.

The book looks back to Pope John Paul II’s historical visit to Britain in 1982, as well as Pope Benedict’s state visit in 2010, tracing progress on both political and religious fronts. But it also recalls the darker days of division and alienation that lasted for four and a half centuries before John Paul’s groundbreaking pastoral visit.

To delve deeper into its pages and the story it tells, Philippa Hitchen sat down with Britain’s current representative to the Holy See, Ambassador Nigel Baker.

You may listen to the interview here.

As Ambassador Baker commented:

"During the colloquium I reminded people that this our oldest embassy, our embassy to the Holy See. The first resident British ambassador – English ambassador, at the time – was sent on mission in 1479 by King Edward IV. […] So when you get into context, talking about the Britain – Holy See relationship, you have to go back a long way in history and look at the impact of history, how we’ve got to where we are now.

"I think sometimes people can get confused. I always tell people I am accredited to the Holy See, which means the global Catholic network, the governance of the global Catholic Church. And I think people quite quickly realise that’s quite a different beast from a bilateral ambassador to, for example, the republic of Italy. In the colloquium and in the book we have presentations from two British cardinals, who remember the visit of Pope John Paul II vividly; we have Scottish, Welsh and English contributions; important contributions about the ecumenical relationship – both an Anglican bishop and an official of the Holy See talking about the relationship between Catholicism and Anglicanism. And I think all of these add to that complex mix which is the relationship between Britain and the Holy See, which goes far beyond the sometimes rather transactional relationship that ordinary bilateral relationships can be.”

Amazon.com has an entry for the booklet, but does not have it in stock! I am still searching.

Diplomacy and Division Between England and Rome

As I noted yesterday, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning to discuss the meeting between Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II. This is not the Queen's first visit to the Vatican.

In 1980, Queen Elizabeth met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican as part of a State Visit to Italy. She has also met Pope John Paul II, Pope John XIII, and Pope Pius XII at the Vatican (the latter when she was a princess) in private audiences. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI met her during their visits to the British Isles, in 1982 and 2010, respectively.

This is not a State Visit--the Queen and the Duke are having a private luncheon with the President of Italy and then going to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis. They will meet at the Santa Marta guesthouse and not in the Apostolic Palace.

There are many pictures on the web of Queen Elizabeth's earlier visits, wearing a black dress, black closed shoes, and a black veil--but the veil or head covering is not technically required.

Because of the English Reformation, the history of English and Vatican diplomatic relations since the 16th century has been uneven, to say the least. Before Henry VIII"s break from Rome (Pope Clement VII), English monarchs sent ambassadors to the Papal States, as the popes of that era were secular rulers in addition to being the Bishop of Rome and the Vicar of Christ. Henry VII and Henry VIII additionally had "Cardinal Protectors" who addressed ecclesiastical matters like the appointment of bishops. England had a long history of links to Rome and those links had been strong for centuries--Saxon and Mercian kings began the tradition of giving Peter's Pence, which of course ended during Henry VIII's reign.

Mary I and James II both re-established some diplomatic ties to the Vatican, but her death and the Glorious Revolution, respectively, ended those brief periods. Informal diplomacy between the Great Britain and the Pope took place during the French Revolution under the argument that the enemy of my enemy is my friend--in opposition to the French Revolution and the First Empire under Napoleon.

The first post-Reformation ambassador was assigned to the Vatican in 1914 at the beginning of World War I--and he was a Catholic, Henry Howard. His official title was "His Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary on a Special Mission to His Holiness the Pope". Things were stable for awhile and then in the 1930's troubles between Church and State in Malta led to another long break in higher level diplomacy at least. The Troubles in Northern Ireland also strained relations and an ambassador-level official was not appointed again until 1982, the same year that Pope John Paul II visited Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales.

The current British ambassador to the Holy See (not the Vatican City-State) is Nigel Baker. The current ambassador from the Holy See to the Court of St. James--that is, the current Apostolic Nuncio--is Archbishop Antonio Mennini.