Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ Catholics pointed to at least a hundred years’ worth of transgressions by Londoners dating back to Henry VIII, whose defiance of the Pope in 1530 over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon broke the ties that bound the English Church to Rome, and led to the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys. They pointed to the sins of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, who had ordered the execution of the ‘holy’ king, Charles I, he who had lived a life of devotion and had ‘suffered martyrdom in defence of the most holy religion’. They also drew up a list of current sins – ‘the prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’, as John Evelyn detailed in his diary – in which the mostly Protestant population had indulged.

      And for Protestants there was an alternative list of sins that a presumably different God had punished in the Fire of London, namely those of the corrupt Romish monasteries and abbeys which had perverted the ancient religion and accumulated excessive wealth while indulging in simony, fecundity and hypocrisy. They remembered the sins of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, who had sent some 300 Protestants to a violent death for heresy in the 1550s and blamed Catholic agitators for starting the Fire. Yet others believed that the Fire had been started by a Jew distraught that the supposed messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who had claimed he would be crowned that month, had backed down when faced with the wrath of the Turkish Sultan (→ p. 69).

      Soon after the Fire, rumours spread that Robert Hubert, a French silversmith, allegedly an agent of the French king, had started the blaze on the Pope’s orders. Hubert was arrested in east London. He admitted that he had left Sweden for the English capital and gone to Pudding Lane where he had used a long pole to lob a fireball through the window of Farriner’s bakery. Hubert boasted of twenty-three co-conspirators, but his confession was probably false: there was no window at Farriner’s bakery and no ship had sailed into east London from Sweden on the day he claimed to have arrived. Nevertheless he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged at Tyburn (→ p. 79).

       GREAT SYNAGOGUE (1690–1941), Duke’s Place

      Used by Jews of north European descent (Ashkenazis) until it was destroyed in the Second World War, the Great Synagogue was the traditional seat of the chief rabbi, a post and office which do not exist in Jewish law. Consequently, some religious Jews claimed that the office of the Chief Rabbi had been created only to make Judaism more acceptable to the Church of England, and would mock the incumbent as the heimische Archbishop of Canterbury.

      When a fire broke out in the Great Synagogue in the 1750s, Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the eighteenth-century mystic known as the Ba’al Shem of London (master of the secret names of God), is alleged to have extinguished it by inscribing on the jamb of the entrance the four Hebrew letters of God’s most-used name (Yahweh in English), supposedly causing the wind to change direction and the blaze to die down.

      → Falk in the East End, p. 55

       HOLY TRINITY PRIORY ALDGATE, Mitre Square

      The priory which opened in 1109 and soon became the grandest religious house in London, was the scene of one of the first recorded murders in London history. In 1530 Brother Martin, a priory monk, stabbed to death a woman praying at the high altar and then killed himself. The body of Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was found on the same site more than 350 years later. Some Ripper experts believe Eddowes was killed elsewhere and the corpse placed there as part of a still unexplained ritualistic agenda.

      After Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declaring himself head of the Church of England, he closed down establishments such as Holy Trinity. The priory surrendered its authority to the Crown by ‘mutual agreement’ and its incumbents were forced to embark on secular life. The buildings lay in ruins for some years and, even when the owners offered the stone free to any man who would take it down, there were no takers.

       JEWRY STREET

      The street was home in the sixteenth century to the first Jewish community allowed to live in the capital since Edward I expelled the Jews from Britain in 1291. Its number included Rodrigo Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, who was once accused of participating in a plot to poison the queen and on whom Shakespeare partly based Shylock. Most of the new immigrant Jews came from Spain and Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Christianity and were known by the insulting name marranos (Spanish for ‘swine’) due to their practice of hanging pigs outside their homes to show they had converted to Catholicism. After Oliver Cromwell officially allowed the Jews to return to the capital in 1656, this eastern edge of the City became the main centre of Jewish immigration into London. Their first new synagogue, on Creechurch Lane, has long been demolished.

       JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION, Aldersgate Street by Ironmongers’ Hall

      John Wesley, the early eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, experienced an epiphany at Hall House, Nettleton Court on 24 May 1738. He later wrote that:

       In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

      → Wesley in Bolton, p. 220

       THE MONUMENT, Fish Street Hill

      The tall Doric column just north of London Bridge was built as a memorial to the 1666 Great Fire of London but has many religious connections. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in 1671–7, and decorated by the artist Caius Gabriel Cibber during his daytime parole from debtors’ prison. He designed a relief depicting a female figure (London) grieving in front of burning buildings to recall the fallen Jerusalem from the Book of Lamentations ‘sitting solitary as a widow [that] weepeth sore in the night, her tears on her cheeks’.

      Because so many people believed Catholics were responsible for the Fire, the Monument was given an inscription in 1681 (not removed until 1831) which blamed the disaster on the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and Heresy’. And just in case there was anyone who hadn’t fully received the message, another inscription by Farriner’s bakery, where the blaze began, stated that ‘here by permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists . . .’

      A best-selling pamphlet published at that time urged Protestants to go to the top of the tower and imagine the consequences of popish rule: ‘The whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of heretic dogs.’

      The Monument is the tallest stone column in the world, its height, 202 foot, being the same as the distance between it and the baker’s shop on nearby Pudding Lane where the Fire started. The 202-foot measurement was not randomly chosen. The Monument is positioned so that an observer looking east in the morning and west in the afternoon on the day of the summer solstice can see the sun sitting directly on top of the flaming urn of gilt bronze that crowns its top. Ingeniously the Monument also stands a distance of 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement often used by architects wanting to imbue their buildings with ‘divine protection’) from Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Christopher Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, and 2,000 cubits from the western end of Wren’s own St Paul’s Cathedral.

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