Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Are those fireworks, or are we being invaded as the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the monarchy all collapsed? The Labour Party has let out two prisoners by mistake, but the Conservative Party was unable to expose that because it could not count to six. Only that level of decay makes the monarchy look relatively healthy.

Most people think that we are celebrating Guy Fawkes as a folk hero for having tried to blow up Parliament. Even those who know the history enter into that spirit by calling him “the last man to enter that place with an honourable intention” and so on. On 16 October 1834, it burned down anyway. 229 years earlier, most Catholics had had no idea about the Gunpowder Plot, and they would have disapproved of it in the strongest possible terms. But they, of course, paid the price for it.

Just as they did for the Spanish Armada, even though the Navy that defeated it was commanded by a Catholic, Lord Howard of Effingham, as loyal to his Queen Elizabeth as I was to mine. Philip of Spain had expected to be supported by a Catholic uprising in England. But there never was one. As anyone who had known anything about the English Catholics could have told him that there was never going to be.

It was also on this date that William of Orange landed at Brixham in 1688. An invasion by invitation is still an invasion. In any case, against the Bourbons and thus their Stuart cousins, he was allied to the Papal States. A Papal Blessing was sent to him when he set out for Ireland, and there hangs at Stormont a painting depicting his crossing of the Boyne with, in the sky, a vignette of the Pope with his hand raised in blessing. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome. His Protestantism was most manifest in the fact that he was married to his first cousin. They had no children, but the intention had been that they should.

Yet now, the King is a Royal Confrater of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, until quite recently often known in English as Saint Paul Without the Walls. As the Old Labour saying goes, “We may be a broad church, but even the broadest church needs walls.” When the King gave Royal Assent to assisted suicide, then would he place himself without them?

He has already stepped beyond others. On Saturday, the West End Ulster Defence Union refused to sing God Save the King at its Remembrance event. Following Charles III’s recent prayer with the Pope, “we cannot, in good conscience, recognise him as the rightful King. Our loyalty is to the Throne as ordained under God, not to any individual who betrays the faith and duty upon which it stands. We continue to pray that he will repent and turn to the truth of the Gospel and the responsibilities of a Christian Sovereign. If he does not, then we pray that a true and faithful Protestant will arise to restore righteousness to the Crown and to the Nation.” Gosh.

I Vow to Thee, My Country was sung instead. That is theologically nowhere near as bad as O Valiant Hearts; in his 1939-1945 Star, his Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, his Italy Star, his France and Germany Star, and his War Medal 1939–1945, my father simply would not have that one, and he was not alone in that view. But it does offer one’s country “the love that asks no questions”. At the bride’s request, it was sung at the King’s first wedding, which was why it was also sung both at his first wife’s funeral and at her tenth anniversary memorial service. And now, it has become an alternative National Anthem for those who considered him an illegitimate monarch. Again, gosh.

But then, when none of the children of Queen Anne and of Prince George of Denmark and Norway survived, then the Throne passed to the House of Hanover largely due to arrangements made by the Spencers, entwining the two dynasties for centuries until they went too far and intermarried. The King is a patrilineal member of the same House of Oldenburg as was Prince George. It took that very ancient and illustrious Royal House 308 years to accede here, but it has. Even from beyond the grave, will Spencer Whiggery do for it a second time? The Raise the Colours fraternity, which has amused some of us by making parts of the old 32-County Republic of Consett look like East Belfast, has been expressing its scorn for the King because of his environmentalism and his perceived Islamic sympathies.

Long hidden, they have deep wells on which to draw. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist once more the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia. Under the name of Reformed Presbyterian, the original Cameronian, Covenanting tradition that saw the Revolution of 1688 as an anything but Glorious betrayal, lives on in tiny numbers in Scotland, Canada and Australia, and in still small, but nevertheless larger ones in Northern Ireland. That it is the origin of the epithet “Hun” is contested, but there is no doubt that the opponents of Irish Home Rule conspired with “Protestant Bill the Kaiser”. Far from having decommissioned its weapons, Ian Paisley’s Ulster Resistance has never so much as declared a ceasefire. Think on.