Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ services, seized the choir stalls, tore down the altar cross and spat on and kicked the clergy. They even urinated on the pews.

      The mob would have thrown the Revd King into the docks had his friends not made a cordon across a bridge, enabling him to get to the Mission House safely. The church was forced to close and allowed to reopen only when King promised not to wear ceremonial vestments during Mass. Even when services began again there were often as many as fifty police officers stationed in the wings ready in case of trouble.

      → Riots at St Giles Cathedral, p. 262

       SALVATION ARMY BIRTHPLACE, outside the Blind Beggar pub, 337 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel

      One evening in June 1865 William Booth, a tall, fierce-looking revivalist preacher sporting a long black beard down to his chest, heard two missionaries preaching at an open-air meeting outside the Blind Beggar pub. When they invited any Christian bystander to join them, Booth exclaimed: ‘There is heaven in East London for everyone who will stop to think and look to Christ as a personal saviour.’ He told them of the love of God in offering salvation through Jesus Christ in such clear terms that they invited him to take charge of a special mission tent they were holding nearby.

      This was the beginning of what became the Salvation Army. Within a year Booth’s mission had more than sixty converts and he was returning home ‘night after night haggard with fatigue’, as his wife Catherine later explained, ‘his clothes torn and bloody, bandages swathing his head where a stone had struck’.

      Booth had moved to London in 1849 and drawn up a personal code of conduct which read:

       I do promise – my God helping – that I will rise every morning sufficiently early (say 20 minutes before seven o’clock) to wash, dress, and have a few minutes, not less than five, in private prayer. That I will as much as possible avoid all that babbling and idle talking in which I have lately so sinfully indulged. That I will endeavour in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of the bleeding Lamb.

      Booth preached regularly across the East End, condemning the usual vices: drinking, gambling, watching cricket and football – anything that people enjoyed but which could lead to unchristian behaviour – surrounded by what a supporter called ‘blaspheming infidels and boisterous drunkards’. In 1878 he reorganised the mission along quasi-military lines and began using the name Salvation Army. His preachers were given military-style ranks such as major and captain, with Booth himself as the general. The Salvation Army’s banner in red, blue and gold sported a sun symbol and the motto ‘Blood and Fire’, the blood that of Christ and the fire that of the Holy Spirit.

      Salvation Army bands would march into town ‘to do battle with the Devil and his Hosts and make a special attack on his territory’. Their services provided the model for what became known disparagingly the following century as ‘happy clappy’ – joyous singing, Hallelujahs, beseeching for repentance, hand-clapping. Evil-doers and lost souls flocked to repent, even when the organisation’s enemies, the so-called ‘Skeleton Army’, marching under a skull and crossbones banner, attempted to drive the Salvation Army off the streets. Within ten years Booth had 10,000 officers, and had opened branches in Iceland, Argentina and Germany. By the time he died the Salvation Army had spread to fifty-eight countries worldwide.

       TOWER HILL EXECUTION SITE

      The hill to the north of the Tower of London was one of the capital’s main sites for religiously motivated executions, along with Smithfield and Tyburn. Its victims include perhaps the most famous of all British martyrs, Thomas More, who has since been canonised by the Catholic Church.

      Ancient British tribes treated Tower Hill at the edge of the East End as holy and buried the head of Bran, a Celtic god king, under the ground there. Bran’s head supposedly had magical powers and was interred facing France to ward off invaders. Nevertheless it failed to repel the Romans, who came to London shortly after the death of Christ. It also failed to repel the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, who took over London at the end of the eleventh century and built what is still the capital’s greatest landmark – the Tower – by the ancient tribes’ sacred hill. Those executed here include:

      • John Fisher, 1535

      John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, made a famous speech at Paul’s Cross in 1526 denouncing Martin Luther. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535 after opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the king’s wish to make himself head of the English Church. Originally Fisher was supposed to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, but Henry magnanimously commuted the sentence to beheading. The corpse was stripped naked and hung on the scaffold till evening when it was thrown into a pit at the nearby church of All Hallows, Barking. Fisher’s head was later stuck on a pole on London Bridge where it remained for a fortnight before being thrown into the Thames.

      • Thomas More, 1535

      Lawyer, MP and fêted author, More was one of Henry VIII’s leading aides, who resigned the chancellorship when the king declared himself supreme head of the Church in England after the Pope refused to support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. More continued to argue against Henry’s divorce and the split with Rome, and was arrested for treason in 1534. Before going to the scaffold on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535 More urged the governor of the Tower: ‘I pray you, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ He then joked with the executioner: ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man. My neck is very short!’ On the block More moved his beard away with the quip: ‘It were a pity it should be cut off, it has done no treason.’ He was later canonised by the Pope, but has been singled out for criticism by anti-Catholic commentators. They condemn his persecution of the Bible translator William Tyndale, whom he allegedly had arrested and burnt alive for translating the Book of Matthew.

      • Margaret Pole, 1541

      When Margaret Pole was taken for execution in 1541 after refusing to support Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church, she would not agree that she was a traitor and had to have her head forcibly secured to the block. Pole struggled free and ran off closely pursued by the axe-wielding executioner, who killed her by hacking away at her.

      • William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

      One of the major religious figures of the seventeenth century, Laud was a chaplain to James I and became Charles I’s main religious adviser. He was influenced by the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, who championed free will over predestination and loved ceremony at his services, what he called the ‘beauty of holiness’.

      The Puritans became increasingly powerful during Charles’s reign and they hated such ceremonies, which they saw as being dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. In November 1640 the Long Parliament instituted proceedings against what it called King Charles’s ‘evil councillors’, including Laud, who was impeached for high treason. He was accused of subverting the true religion with popish superstition, such as reintroducing stained glass into churches, and of causing the recent disastrous wars against the Scots.

      Laud was sent to the Tower in 1641 and tried before the House of Lords in 1644. He defended himself admirably and the peers adjourned without voting. However, the Commons passed a Bill condemning him and he was beheaded on 10 January 1645. Laud was buried at the nearby church of All Hallows Barking, and after the Restoration was reburied in the vault under the altar at the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford.

      • Christopher Love, 1651

      Love СКАЧАТЬ