The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom Annual Lecture

This year's annual lecture was given by Edmund Matyjaszek at the Parish Hall, St James Church, Spanish Place, London.

The topic was "ENGLAND-THE DOWRY OF MARY: MEANING & MISSION"

This is a copy of the talk from Edmund:

Good evening, and welcome to this historic London Church on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, even though we are in the crypt so the glories of its nave and windows we have to imagine or remember from Mass!
My name is Edmund Matyjaszek and as the event details rightly say, I am Principal of Priory School of Our Lady of Walsingham – the only secondary school in England so designated – and was invited by Derek Williams of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom to give this annual lecture, which is a great honour. The Guild itself was founded in 1887 – for those to whom it is unfamiliar – for the following purposes:

1. The Conversion of England and Wales.
2. The restoration of the lapsed.
3. Prayer for the forgotten dead.

The co-founders of the Guild, Fr. Philip Fletcher M.A. & Mr. Lister Drummond Q.C. chose the title, Our Lady of Ransom, as they saw a spiritual parallel with the work of the medieval Ransomers who were to rescue Christians from Moorish captivity. It dates from 1253. Through the members of the Guild they wished to ransom the country back as Mary’s Dowry by ransoming individuals from the darkness of unbelief and heresy into the light of the Catholic Faith as their website states.
I am aware I am following in very eminent footsteps.

In 2016 Mgr Armitage on:
'The developments and significance of Walsingham’
In 2018, Fr John Saward:
‘England’s Nazareth: England’s Conversion’

But my involvement in Walsingham and the Dowry pre-dates my school. I was from 2004-7 a Director and Trustee of the Poetry Society based not far from here in Betterton Street but it was in 2011 that formal engagement so to speak with the shrine began, when I was invited that year to give a talk at the week-long conference entitled Richeldis 950 – 950 years after the founding of the shrine by the Norfolk lady Richeldis de Faverches – the proceedings of which were subsequently published. My own talk was on “Walsingham in Ballad, Poetry & Prose – partly from the Poetry Society connection. By then this small booklet had been published, containing a series of poem on Walsingham, followed last year by the Rosary: England’s Prayer from St Pauls Publishing in Westminster which has a page on the Dowry. Now I am saying this not for vainglory but to establish, I hope, the credentials for the invitation to speak tonight.
As you may know – and this is the reason for tonight’s subject – the Bishops of England & Wales will be asking all of us to join them and the church in this country in rededicating England as Our Lady’s Dowry in March next year. At present the statue from the shrine is touring every English and Welsh Cathedral, and I so urge you to attend if you can. It is a most moving and enlightening experience, and has a magnificent exhibition that accompanies it. What we are going to cover tonight is that to some degree, but there is a larger question that the shrine and the designation of England as Our Lady’s dowry poses. Walsingham is a pilgrimage shrine with all that attends pilgrimage – prayer, travel, fellowship, devotion. As the ballad of the shrine says:
Therefore, blissed Lady, graunt thou thy great grace
To all that the devoutly visyte in this place.
But the shrine of Walsingham also has a direct – indeed possibly formative – bearing on the tradition that we will be examining tonight - the designation of our country as the Dowry of Mary. And we will be asking the very specific questions: Why England? What for? And in what way is it relevant to our times, if it is at all?
But if we are to start anywhere, let us start at the point where the Dowry entered most fully into public and national life in a recorded and verifiable way.
***************************************************************************

Paint the scene – a weak government, divided counsels, questions over leadership and direction, a nation in uproar, mobs marching on London.

No - not the B word! Unless it be “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”

It is 1381. The young boy King, Richard II, 14 years old is on the throne. Badly advised he imposed a Poll Tax. Those of you who remember 1990 will remember how ill the English to being taxed as persons, rather than upon their property or their income. They take badly to that of course as well, but a Poll Tax is something else! Rebels are at Blackheath mustering. Bishops have been killed. His realm is in peril. What did the young boy king do? His reaction – to go and pray in Westminster Abbey. Here is the contemporary account from Froissart’s Chronicle.

In a small chapel in the abbey there is an image of Our Lady which has great virtues and performs miracles and in which the Kings of England have always placed great faith. The King said his prayers before the statue, dedicating himself to it, then got on horseback with all the barons who were round him. It was somewhere about nine in the morning. He started with his followers along the road which leads into London, but when he had gone a little way, he branched off to the left to pass outside it. The truth was that no one knew where he intended to go when he took this road leading round London.

He met them at Mile End and then at Smithfield, outfaced the rebels (and later betrayed his pardon to them), but secured his kingdom, exhibiting genuine courage for one so young.

It was about the time of Corpus Christi, June 1381. Here on the dais behind is the beautiful picture – it as actually a diptych that can be folded over and taken out to pray before. It commemorates in striking colours and design the public ceremony where King Richard – with his bishops and nobles and Commons – dedicated his kingdom to Our Lady or rather more specifically affirmed or confirmed the gift of England to her as her “Dowry”. As the record states: The diptych was painted for King Richard II of England, who is depicted kneeling before the Virgin and Child in what is known as a donor portrait.
Look at picture – rich in colour and almost translucent in its piercing blue. Here is King Richard, with his personal patron John the Baptist, and with the patron saints of England – King Edmund of East Anglia with the arrows, and St Edward the Confessor, handing the pennant of St George to the Christ child. The little orb at the top, when cleaned a few years ago, showed a tiny portrait of England – quite literally, a precious stone set in a silver sea.
Later, at the special desire of the king, this mandate was issued at Lambeth by his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, in 1399 as follows:
"The contemplation of the great mystery of the Incarnation has brought all Christian nations to venerate her from whom came the beginnings of redemption. But we, as the humble servants of her inheritance, and liegemen of her especial dower - as we are approved by common parlance - ought to excel all others in the favour of our praises and devotions to her." Her especial dower. This strange designation.
The first known artistic evidence for the title is found in a manuscript in the British Museum written during the reign of James I. It describes a painting which once hung in the English Hospice of St Thomas in Rome, now the Venerable English College, which showed St Edmund, Martyr (869) (here on our diptych) kneeling before Our Lady and offering England to her. He holds a parchment with a Latin inscription: “Dos tua Virgo pia Haec est quare rege, Maria” ‘This is your dowry, O pious Virgin, wherefore rule over it’

There is a further story, recorded in Edmund Waterton’s 1879 publication Pietas Mariana Britannica, that before French troops sacked Rome in 1798, at the English College in Rome there existed an ancient painting of a King and Queen who, on their knees, were making an offering of England to Our Blessed Lady for her dower through the hands of John the Baptist, with this inscription:

Dos tua pia haec est, quare lege, Maria.
This is your Dowry, O Holy Virgin, therefore rule over it, Mary.

As no picture survives the varying accounts cannot be exactly verified. But both share the same term. This is definitively confirmed if you look now at the sheet left on your chair, where you will see an image of a painting of Our Lady with arms outstretched over the heads of English seminarians that copies in gesture the other picture with it – Our Lady of Ransom after which our Guild is named.

The Dowry Tour booklet has a most interesting note: In the wake of the Reformation, the notion of England enjoying a special association or relationship with Mary became an important aspect of recusant Catholic spirituality. St Gregory’s Seminary in Seville, had a painting of Our Lady with arms outstretched over the heads of English seminarians with the inscription, “Anglia Dos Maria” England is the Dowry of Mary. At the base of the picture there is a further Latin inscription that reads:
“Britain, once converted, was the first one to give the scepter to Our Lady’s Son, and from then on England has been known as the Dowry of Mary. Thus, we give back the gift, Holy Mother, and pray you to defend, mercifully and with justice all those who are trying to recover it.”
This painting now hangs in the Royal Academy of Medicine in Seville. What is interesting is the clear evidence of the phrase “Anglia Dos Maria”.
About 1475 or 1490, the only extant document on this that escaped Henry VIII’s total destruction of the shrine’s evidence – or his attempt to do - so directly links Walsingham to this tradition of “dos Maria”. It is known as the Pynson Ballad after Henry VII’s printer – this Henry by the way had a great devotion to the shrine and after the Battle of Stoke, the final coda to the Wars of the Roses, hung up his banner in the shrine – states as follows:

O Englonde, great cause thou haste glad for to be,
Compared to the londe of promys syon,
Thou atteynest my grace to stande in that degre
Through this gloryous Ladyes supportacyon,
To be called in every realme and regyon
The holy lande, Oure Ladyes dowre;
Thus arte thou named of olde antyquyte.

These are some of the major – thought few it must be said – items of evidence for the tradition of England as Our Lady’s Dowry. Is it possible – the old adage comes to mind there are no atheists in a foxhole – that faced with the Peasants Revolt, Richard did what many of us do in a ditch, cry out “Rescue me from this – Ransom me from this! - and the kingdom is yours”. I am sure I am not the only one among us today who in dire even desperate straits has said “Only get me out of this and I WILL make a pilgrimage to” – wherever and whenever. Woe betide any of us who renege on that vow! But maybe that was it? If so, or for whatever reason, Richard formally dedicated his kingdom to the Virgin Mary, affirming as these other documents state, a tradition of “olde antyquyte” or “common parlance” of the country being the dowry of Mary.
Further evidence is this from a Burns & Oates title “Our Lady’s Dowry” that is even more powerful proof of how this was so much more than a private devotion:
The Palace of Westminster is so called because it served that purpose for the Kings of England before it became the seat of Parliament. Beside the palace was the royal chapel of St Stephen to which was annexed a smaller chapel called Our Lady of the Pew. These chapels were converted into the Parliament by Edward VI and the paintings on the wall were covered over with oaken panels. In 1800, when the Act of Union united the English and Irish Parliaments, some alterations had to be made to the chamber. When the panelling was taken off the wall, paintings were revealed in the interstices, which were as fresh and clear as the day they had been covered up, owing to their being protected from the air. According to the parliamentary reports of the time, behind the Speaker's chair was a picture of the Virgin and Child with St Joseph bending over them, and King Edward III (Richard’s grandfather) and his Queen and his sons and daughters making an offering to Our Lady. What are we to make of this picture?

Fr Bridgett the author answers:
"It may either have commemorated an historical event, or its execution may be considered an historical event in itself. It is not, nor does it record an act of private devotion... Acolytes were holding lighted tapers and two angels were represented as taking part in a solemnity. It is the consecration of England, through its Sovereign to the Blessed Virgin. It was before the eyes of every King and noble until hidden by Edward VI"
And it is this designation and its utterly public role which takes us beyond just the private devotions of a pilgrimage and the story of a shrine to something on a far larger scale. And I may point out now, that dedication of King Richard II has NEVER BEEN REVOKED. Whether it was just forgotten or whether as a king’s act, later monarchs were chary of revoking – for if one of their ancestor’s or predecessor’s formal acts could be revoked, could not their rulings suffer the same fate – the simple fact is, we were and remain a country dedicated by formal public decree to the Virgin Mary. That is the England in which we have all grown up and now live. The rededication on March 29th next year – happily in Westminster as the first but in the Cathedral not the Abbey, but a mere slingshot away from it – powerful sling I grant you but remember David and Goliath? - is a private act but does not replace or substitute for that formal decree which still stands. This is of peerless significance I will argue and accounts for so much that is felt or sensed to be special about England. More of that later.

2
But what does it mean? Dowry? A country being a dowry. It is a curious phrase to our modern ears. Many of us will know dowry as that of a bride. But in medieval times it had a very specific legal meaning. It comes from the Latin dos – a gift. The word donation comes from the same root. As does data – datum the thing given. It was very specific, and in English Law meant the portion of land set aside by a husband for his wife or widow’s enjoyment alone. It was often used to ensure a crusader’s wife had an estate or portion thereof to support her if she was widowed. A real risk of course in those crusading times.

I had a vivid and unexpected confirmation of this only a few years ago when on holiday in Le Mans in France with my family. Now we associate Le Mans of course with the great motor race, but it was the heart of the Plantagenet lands. I was idly leafing through a tourist guide to the town, in French, when my eyes stood out on stalks, for there it was stated that Berengaria, the wife and widow of Richard I, the Lionheart, retired to her “douaire” near the city after his death. Still a recognised term in use! In fact the helpful Wikipedia has it clear “Berengaria eventually settled in Le Mans, one of her dower properties”. The associated words dower house, dowager, allude to this too. It is something given to a woman, often a widow, in perpetuity, for her use alone.
So England was given to Our Lady for her use alone. Inalienable, never to be taken from her. Curious isn’t it, that the formal dedication of Richard has never been revoked. So that part of the dos or donation still runs clear! And the term seen in that painting in Rome and in your sheet from Seville still holds good “Anglia Dos Maria”. It has never been revoked.

Of course the matter of crusaders’ donations or dowries was intimately connected with Walsingham itself. The shrine’s traditional founding date, which Fr Michael Rear is his magnificent two editions of his book on the shrine which I thoroughly recommend you to read if you are interested in this tale, substantiates this and, I think, conclusively shows that Richeldis’ son Geoffrey went on the first pilgrimage in 1096. It was he who endowed – same etymological root, endowment “dos” – his mother’s chapel as follows: “to God and St Mary and to Edwy his clerk the chapel of Our Lady his mother had founded”. Or in full “Gaufre de Faverches to all the faithful of Holy Church which is in Christ, Greeting. Be it known to you that I have conceded to God and to St Mary and to Edwy my clerk, for instituting a religious order which he himself will have provided, for the salvation of my soul and that of my parents and friends as a perpetual alms, the chapel which my mother founded at Walsingham in honour of the ever-virgin Mary, together with possession of the church…..and everything that the aforesaid Edwy possessed on the day when I undertook the journey to Jerusalem “ “Iter ad Jerusalem” is the Latin phrase and this almost always meant a crusade. This was in 1096 or thereabouts. In 1108 he clearly had returned safe from the crusades as he witnessed another property document. I must say in English affairs if you ever want precise facts, go to the property transactions for then, as now, there’s few things the English take more seriously or document more carefully than their property!! Then we find in 1130 permission was given to his widow to re-marry, which fits all our other dates. Then eventually the Priory was founded in 1153 that was dissolved in 1538. Geoffrey’s gift of his mother’s chapel to the church was re-confirmed in this. So very substantial evidence links the Shrine to its era and its events. Richard’s endowment to Berengaria was in the 1190s. He of course was a crusader too, arguably the greatest. His statue still stands outside Parliament. And it was a vision of the house at Nazareth in Palestine where the Annunciation occurred that Richeldis was given and asked to build a house in Walsingham to commemorate the joy of the annunciation “chief ground of our salvation”. The shrine by the way was always a house NOT the statue. The house was burned down in 1538 and excavations in 1961 found a line of ash that could be dated to the period. The markings of the Holy House are there to this day in the old Abbey grounds. The continuity is clear.

But the curious thing about all this is that the whole country – England – was made over to Our Lady. Not just a shrine on its own. Not just a holy place or places. But the whole country. Set apart in this formal legal way. Not just for devotion or by act of clergy. We see from the commemoration behind us. Now we have looked at this for years but can find no other country so set apart for the Mother of God. Countries have been dedicated but not in this specific formal, public and legal way, handed over as the donor portrait that is the Wilton Diptych makes obvious, to the Virgin. Why? What for? What is the meaning of this?

This royal Throne of Kings, this scepter’d Isle,
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This Fortress built by nature for herself,
Against infection, and the hand of war:
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone, set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier Lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this Realm, this England.

There you have, as John of Gaunt rhapsodises in Shakespeare’s Richard II, this exalted sense.
It goes on most interestingly:

This Nurse, this teeming womb of Royal Kings,
Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds, as far from home,
For Christian service, and true Chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the World’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.

There you have the very word itself of our Guild – Ransom! We find so many words that link to tonight. Blessed plot, this precious stone set in a silver sea – which is exactly like the tiny painting of England in the Wilton Diptych on the orb at the top of the pennant flag given to Christ to represent the donation of England –all in exalted high language telling of nobility, purpose, mission.

At Harfleur Henry in Shakespeare’s later play Henry V cries out “God for Harry, England and St George” But Waterton notes his saying at Agincourt

“Our Lady for her dowry, St George and St Edward to our aid”

According to the monastic chronicler of the time, Thomas Elmham, English priests sought the intercession of "the Virgin, protectress of her dower" on the eve of Agincourt in 1415.
And this sense of England as a special land was then taken by the pilgrims of a later time Taken to the USA when some of those at the other end of Elizabethan & Jacobean religious uniformity, suffering from it as Catholics such as Robert Persons who founded the Seville seminary in 1592 did earlier, sailed from Plymouth to take their version of a promised land and set up in New England a “city upon a hill” that still is the animating identity of the United States. Listen to the original text of John Winthrop of 1630 and the phrase that goes directly back to that in the Pynson Ballad and all it transmits:
………wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us

The scriptural text is from Matthew 5:14: "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden".
“The eyes of the worlds are upon us” Note all in the public domain, all open to view, nothing hidden.
But the idea that the God of Israell is among us, that his people shall be made a prayse and glory and the sense of being almost a chosen people comes from that sense of England itself being special. And where, pray, did that come from if not this tradition from “olde antyquyte”?
Of course we know the distortions that can occur throughout history from that sense of a “special land”, or to use a fearful modern echo, when you consider your land “uber alles” above all else. But that is not what this concept of the Dowry conveys. Rather that it is under the rule of another, higher monarch, the Queen of Heaven. But listen to a recent account and one hardly prejudiced or open to the accusations of nationalism or the vision of the right – or should it be of the night – that is Kenneth Morgan in 1985 in the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, where he says:

That Britain was able to assimilate the strains of its political revolution as early as the 17th Century and of its industrial revolution as early as the 18th, in each case long before other European nations did so, testified to the rooted strength of its institutions and its culture.
In its many forms, this rooted patriotism endured and remained unquenchable. The visible, recognised symbols of that patriotic sense still survive – Crown, Parliament, the processes of law. But what is equally striking, perhaps, is the patriotism of the dissenting critics also, with their alternative scenarios. The Levellers, Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett. William Morris, RH Tawney, George Orwell (and I would add in our time Billy Bragg who wrote a most interesting book on how to tell his son about England, his country), all in their time emerged as passionate, libertarian opponents of the social inequalities and political imbalance of their day. Yet each of them emerged, also, as deeply committed to an almost religious sense of the civilized essence of their country and its people, their history and destiny.

Therein you start to find in an unexpected modern context the substance of our examination tonight. “An almost religious sense of the essence of our country”. I would only say – delete the word almost. For our country is of a religious essence. This very idea, this very dedication of 1381, to be renewed next year.
But how do we cross from this rich but almost semi-obliterated history, this inchoate feeling of something special about the country, this idea of dedication, to modern times? And why Mary? And why Walsingham? And why a holy house? And why the shrine?
Now the latter has always been easy to answer in a personal sense. Let me read you the Prayer of Erasmus from the 1510s or 20s when he visited the shrine, taking time off from his studies in Cambridge.

Prayer of Erasmus
O, alone of all women, Mother and Virgin, Mother most blessed, Virgin most pure, we salute you, we honour you as best we can with our humble offerings. May your son grant us that imitating your most holy manners, we also, by the Grace of the Holy Spirit may deserve to conceive the Lord Jesus spiritually in our inmost soul, and once conceived never to lose him. Amen. Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us.
Now this is the personal devotion of the shrine. As Mgr Armitage says so eloquently in the videos and script that accompany the tour, we come to Walsingham to share in the joy of Our Lady’s Annunciation. As the Pynson Ballad shows –

And this is the cause, as it apereth by lyklynesse,
In the is belded newe Nazareth, a mancyon
To the honoure of the hevenly empresse
And of hir moste gloryous salutacyon,
Chyef pryncypyll and grounde of oure salvacyon,
Whan Gabryell sayd at olde Nazereth 'Ave',
This joy here dayly remembred for to be.

Yes this joy is to be remembered. The new Nazareth is in her honour. It is the cause of the land being known as her dowry, set apart for her use alone. But that curious word “lyklynesse.”. Wherein does that lie in the country itself? What does that mean? And I return to the question again? Why England? What for? God does not do things without a function and a purpose. A beautiful tradition, a lovely shrine, prayer and piety and pilgrimage. Yes, to build up, as the dowry booklets tell us, the evangelisation of our country. “So let us like Mary conceive him in our hearts, that we may bring him forth into the world, rejoicing with his mother“. Yes to re-evangelise England. But again I ask. Why England? The whole country? What for? What must the whole country do to be her dowry? What does our good Lady and Her son want from the country through this designation? And in such open and public form? Unless it is just to be a private devotion – but all the evidence points the other way.

Now I am not sure what your view or idea of England is. But we need – or rather I need – in order to take this story further, to step back into my own personal history as an Englishman, as a Catholic, to take this tale to the point where, for me, I stumbled upon the clue that gave the whole meaning to the Dowry and allowed me to cross from personal to public and back again, with the confirmation and reinforcement of both, in complete consonance with being “mere English”.

I was born in London and grew up in the 50s, the son of a Polish soldier and a Scots/Irish teacher who settled in London after the war, and remember vividly going to church twice on Sunday – once for Mass in the morning with the long 3 hour fast that would leave me quite faint if I was going to communion; and then sometimes benediction in the evening when I would stand as the packed church sang Faith of Our Fathers. Do you remember it? Faith of Our Fathers living still, in spite of dungeon fire and sword. We will be true to thee till death.

I found myself a little embarrassed, standing at the back of St Joseph’s in Wealdstone, experiencing what I would now probably identify as a kind of “revivalist” atmosphere, finding the defiant, entrenched sense of the hymn faintly off putting. No matter. I grew up with a pretty standard “ghetto” Catholicism, being a “cradle catholic” as they used to day, but also with a standard English Education – Shakespeare, Elizabeth, the Armada, the Napoleonic wars, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Nelson and Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Victoria, India, the Empire, the hungry 30s, their Finest Hour, the NHS and the Welfare State. The Whig view of history if you like. The growth of Parliament, Chartists, English fair play, Magna Carta – one can make these lists easily. But it was a standard view of England or rather Britain in a way. Yes, empire and colonialism and slavery but also its abolition, the in many ways unbloody dissolution of Empire, Shakespeare as England’s trumpeting mouthpiece in her glory days of Elizabeth and the defeat of the Armada, “Good Queen Bess”. Law, Parliament and Freedom. Yes, freedom above all. Living in the shadow of the Second World War “The defence of freedom” gave us all I think a heightened, patriotic sense of our country. What Kenneth Morgan catches so well I think.

But detached from religion in a way, which was still of a ghetto Catholicism. Catholics were, well, not quite “English”. John Henry Newman, to be canonised of course this Sunday, catches it well in his Second Spring Sermon of 1852 after the restoration of the hierarchy.

No longer the Catholic Church in the country; nay, no longer, I may say, a Catholic community;—but a few adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been. "The Roman Catholics;"—not a sect, not even an interest, as men conceived of it, —not a body, however small, representative of the Great Communion abroad,—but a mere handful of individuals, who might be counted, like the pebbles and detritus of the great deluge, and who, forsooth, merely happened to retain a creed which, in its day indeed, was the profession of a Church. Here a set of poor Irishmen, coming and going at harvest time, or a colony of them lodged in a miserable quarter of the vast metropolis. There, perhaps an elderly person, seen walking in the streets, grave and solitary, and strange, though noble in bearing, and said to be of good family, and a "Roman Catholic." An old-fashioned house of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate, and yews, and the report attaching to it that "Roman Catholics" lived there; but who they were, or what they did, or what was meant by calling them Roman Catholics, no one could tell;—though it had an unpleasant sound, and told of form and superstition.

Accurate? I can recognise it from my youth. Can some of you?

I grew up with this experience and yet also the sweep of English History and its patriotism and sense of public service. But how did, or could, one connect with the other? And matters to do with the Dowry and England and faith had that sense of a haunted wish for revival, a harking to a medieval past, if I may say it, of guilds and gothic cathedrals, Chesterton and his “rolling English Road”, of multiple candles lit in a darkened church? Faintly musty and old? It had nothing to do with Nelson and Armadas and fighting for freedom – in fact was pictured, almost caricatured, as being set against that.

And so it lay, at least for me. Perhaps undisturbed, a dichotomy of mind and identity that hardly caused much trouble, except for this curious and strange idea of the whole country being “special” in some way. Now this is not I think for a moment personal to me or to Catholics. Not at all. It is shared quite widely. And if I may say has been consistent down the centuries from Shakespeare to our own times, this sense of England.

I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Or Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer, in our own day as follows in his 2009 “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”.

My grandfather was born the second son of a family that has lived for six hundred and twenty-one unbroken generations in the same house, Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire. This books is a record of my family and, through them, a simplified squint at the history of my country, England, warts and all, from its beginnings until 1944 when I was born. Churchill wrote: ‘There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word which means more to me than any other. That word is England.’ I go along with that.

Or the story of Laurence Olivier playing Henry V at the Old Vic in the 30s when Noel Coward burst backstage afterwards to exclaim “You are England!”. That strange sense of the country having some curious personified identity or role. What Kenneth Morgan more soberly alludes to.

Then by chance in a second hand bookstore in Chiswick when I lived near there some years ago I came across a copy of the NT in Greek. I still have the copy. You see I had gone up to university on Classics, Latin and Greek. Though we had never studied the NT, at least not in Oxford Mods. And one day, I am not quite sure for what reason, I was curious to know the word Our Lady actually used at the Annunciation – Aramaic of course in spoken word I presume, but in the original text Greek. Now we know our prayers – I hope we know our prayers! The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary And she conceived by the Holy Ghost. Behold the handmaid of her Lord Be it done to me according to the word, Hallowed. Familiar, Treasured.

Or again Mary’s “Fiat”. Her yes at the Annunciation. Fiat. It has come to mean an assertion of decision. Helpful Mr Google may adumbrate: The Blessed Virgin's answer, in Latin, was Fiat. "Fiat" in Latin which translates literally as "let it be done" in English. So people speak of "Mary's fiat" to refer to her agreement to be the mother of her Lord. Helpful Mr Google!

So I looked up the quote in Luke. I will read it out to you. Idou e doule Kuriou; yevoito moi kata to rema sou. I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word – as we know it. The word of her agreement, her fiat is actually in Greek genoito. And by the way doule is NOT handmaid. It is slave. It signifies a total abasement. Now I had never read the New Testament in Greek at all. But I knew what genoito was from classical Greek. From ginomai. The same root as Genesis, genes, generation, gentile, gentleman. My head felt it had exploded. I think I am still reeling from that word these 30, 40 years on.

It has nothing to do with something being “done” to anyone. It means, quite literally, to become, to occur, to happen. The Greek for action is quite different. The Latin is factum or res gesta or ago leading to agenda. But it is NOT genoito. Mary had nothing DONE to her. She allowed what was said to her to occur, to find a home, to take root. She chose.

Then I started to look lots of things up. It became a philological quest. I checked Jerome’s translation. Fiat is fine. It means to become to happen to occur. Fiat lux in Genesis. Let there be light. Fio is the Latin verb, fieri, Not faceo, facere, factum est. Let the angel’s message find a home in me. Welcome.

She chose.

Then I turned to authorities. The Catechism brackets the word “done”. Let it be [done] to me. They bracket it. The Authorised Version, King James Bible. 1611. Let it be unto me.

Jerome’s fiat was precise. Whatever the connotation of submissiveness the word “Mary’s fiat” may have taken on. Then verbum caro factum est. No. Wrong. If you go to the cathedral of my diocese of Portsmouth you will find above its door in Greek “sarx egeneto”.

We say it in our creed accurately. The word became flesh. It was not “made” flesh. It was born flesh. It became flesh. There was “generation”. Jerome translated precisely in fiat.
He did not it seems to me in factum est as a translation of “sarx egeneto”. Nothing was factumed to Mary. Nothing was ever Done to her. She was presented with the message and took it to her heart. Exactly like a valid marriage – not under duress but with freedom of vows of consent. She had set before her life and death as the Deuteronomy she would have known says: Chose life that you and your children may live. She did. To our eternal benefit.

Then I started to look a little more. Our father who art in heaven… thy will be done. No. It says genetheto. He uses his mother’s word. Then again in Gethsemane Not my will but thine be done. No. Ginestho. His mother’s word

A reading confirmed in that catechism bracket. Be it [done] unto me

Or as the great St Augustine says” Therefore Mary is more blessed in receiving the faith of Christ, than in conceiving the flesh of Christ. “It is her moral act of assent prior to her physical conception. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1992 para 494 “Thus giving consent to God’s word, Mary becomes the mother of Jesus.”

The spiritual consent in the heart preceding the conception in the flesh. What the Lord asks of us in marriage and sexuality. Let our troth be plighted before we sleep with our beloved. The spirit precedes matter. In fact ab origine did. As in creation itself. And creation will finally be taken up in the resurrected body of Christ that the spirit raised from the dead.

Then there is English History itself. We come to this curious word in the Pynson ballad. Lyklynesse. Where did England come from? We all know the synod of Whitby in England’s early days in 665 when the Roman system was adopted in preference to the Irish monastic system of celebrating Easter. But are we unfamiliar with 673, the Synod of Hertford. When there were 7 kingdoms warring and competing. Yet when the bishops of these kingdoms – Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex – all came together an ecclesial unity was born that preceded the first coinage that might gesture at England in the 770s – Offa Rex Anglorum – and precedes by nearly 400 years Angle-Land in documents. England was a spiritual kingdom, an ecclesial reality before it was a political unity. The same “procession”.

But then the very tradition I grew up in – the defence of freedom – so very real to me and my brothers as it was that very defence that took in my father and his army comrades in 1940 (he was a Polish Army officer). And the great cry of Poland throughout the war – for your freedom and ours – that again was the very essence of the Annunciation and the incarnation honoured at Walsingham.

So all of it fell into place though that simple Greek verb and its associated meanings. What England defended throughout her history was what allowed Mary to consent – freedom. I had crossed the divide in my mind. The country I loved and lived in was predicated on the faith I followed. The two were one. A true patriotism was itself hedged with the limitations of God’s law for to love England and to cherish her traditions and principles was rooted in the very faith that was beyond earthly power and that earthly power was subject to – the kingdom of God. And the purpose of the dowry was to incarnate those values in the very tissue of the land, what Churchill in 1940, the year my father arrived here, “the long continuity of our institutions”

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions

“the survival of Christian civilisation”. He spoke truer than he knew of his beloved country – he was a son of the Dowry. And those epoch making eras that define our history and identity then found their alliance with this, or rather their root in this. Take for example the following, Nelson, the vicar’s son, and his prayer before Trafalgar:

On the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson was found kneeling in his cabin, saying this prayer, which he also wrote down:

May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory: and may no misconduct, in any one, tarnish it: and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British fleet. For myself individually, I commit my life to Him who made me and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.
Amen. Amen. Amen.

How well that shows the complete integrity in personal conduct and devotion and public service. For when love of country is placed at the service of God – as the whole of England is by its formal dedication in 1381 – then there cannot be an unjust nationalism for that which assesses all is the external law and truth and word of God. We can invoke a passionate patriotism for it is centred on the dowry, not on a land or people or race alone. That is the secret of England, the “concealed heart of the English identity” as the Irish poet Tom Paulin said.

To go to Newman again speaking of old England:

And then, too, its religious orders, its monastic establishments, its universities, its wide relations all over Europe, its high prerogatives in the temporal state, its wealth, its dependencies, its popular honours,—where was there in the whole of Christendom a more glorious hierarchy? Mixed up with the civil institutions, with kings and nobles, with the people, found in every village and in every town,—it seemed destined to stand, so long as England stood, and to outlast, it might be, England's greatness.

I would argue the two are inseparable through the mediation of the Dowry itself. It was this extension into the physical, public domain of our country of the private devotions of piety; to build institutions that embody the values of the kingdom that is not of this world.

Look even at our royal crest! The Lion and Unicorn. The physical animal; the creature of the imagination of the kingdom that is not of this world. I wrote an article on this in 2016 after the referendum and the Catholic Herald entitled it “How England took flesh“. When I first read that phrase I was shocked as I thought it was almost blasphemous. But then I realised no – exactly right. For as at Walsingham, in the house that is holy, in her own home, she gave her consent and the word was incarnate in her, so in her country, set apart for her use alone, a spiritual kingdom since 673, we need to hear the truth, to hear the word, embed it in our hearts and then through our societal interactions, through the processes of our public life, incarnate in our institutions that can carry on after us the values of our God, of her Son.

And is that not what England has given to the world? Parliament, the resolution of conflict through discussion not violence, the rule of law, respected for itself alone – for all true law and authority comes from God alone – the respect for the choice exercised in public votes – and note vote and vow come from the same Latin root – voleo, volens, voluntary. Even in the sometimes maligned FBV of modern education – which I know about as I run a school and must submit to Ofsted’s jurisdiction – yet the 4 cardinal points are ones that do embody much of this tradition:

Democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths or beliefs. This living tissue of continuity and agreement. This is the Dowry at work. This is what it is for.

To echo this from outside our own religious traditions, let us return for the last time to one of our earlier authorities Rupert Brooke in 1915

His poem the Soldier we quoted from earlier was read from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral the year he died, 1915. Criticised by Leavis, it still, only a few year ago, could be what an old nun in Ryde, Isle of Wight, where I live wished to have read at her funeral. It has achieved iconic status. But listen to this from a book written after his death that collected much of his work.

His ship called in at Port Said in Egypt, from where he wrote: “I’ve been collecting a few words, detaching lines from the ambient air, collating one or two golden phrases…”. He writes to his editor, Edward Marsh, of an “ode-threnody…about the existence – and non-locality – of England”. Marsh states “here are the scraps which seem to belong to the ‘ode-threnody’ on England”. (Avon of course is the river of Stratford, Shakespeare’s home town).

In Avons of the heart her rivers run.

She is with all we have loved and found and known,
Closed in the little nowhere of the brain.

Only, of all our dreams,
Not the poor heap of dust and stone,
This local earth, set in terrestrial streams,
Not this man, giving all for gold,
Nor that, who has found evil good, nor those
Blind millions, bought and sold……

She is not here, or now -
She is here, and now, yet nowhere -
We gave her birth, who bore us –
Our wandering feet have sought, but never found her –
She is built a long way off –
She, though all men be traitors, not betrayed -
Whose soil is love, and her stars justice, she –
Gracious with flowers
And robed and glorious in the sea.

[She was in his eyes, but he could not see her.
And he was England, but he knew her not. ]

Gracious with flowers. Robed and glorious in the sea. Listen again to the Pynson Ballad
400 years earlier.

So the house of Nazareth, England’s Nazareth, out of which will come – has come and will come again – the very intricacies and sinews and joints and patchings of a public polity that will reconcile law and liberty, will have political change without violence, will care for the sick and the dying, belonging as it does to the gracyous Lady, glory of Jerusalem,

This Holy Land that is our land.
Now do we not in some way already know that? We are not very far from the sentiment of the poem Jerusalem by William Blake, often touted with its music by Stanford as one option for England’s national anthem,
Til we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land”

What makes it holy? To have the spirit of God – remember our soldiers and admiral and statesman? - embed in the actual processes of the land to make it a Jerusalem of the spirit. It may seem exaggerated – but what else are we here for? What other country has this designation and destiny? Why else are we English?
Remember it is both personal and public; private and procedural. It flows from within to out, and returns back as the processes created not only create public coherence but reinvigorate private purpose. Perfectly summed up by Admiral Nelson, a fusion of private and public:
I commit my life to Him who made me and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.
So long evenings in committee rooms arguing over planning laws. Trudging in the rain to vote in parish halls serving as Election booths. Meetings with heads of school asking for your child to be taken out of pernicious relationship education that is at the service of a bullying sexual ideology because the law says you can and you wish to peacefully assert your rights.

For I am commanding you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, statutes, and ordinances, so that you may live and increase, and the LORD your God may bless you in the land you are entering to possess.…
Or as an earlier poet put it at the time of the First World War:

There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?

"Arise, Jerusalem, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. Behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and a mist the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee”. Newman again.

So the Dowry stands between the twin modern evils of a rampant and intolerant secularism which will not acknowledge or even allow the spiritual domain to exist much less have any rights; and the threat and too often reality of political/religious violence and jihadism, Between the two – in medio stat virtus – as ever Christ was, between the two thieves – stands the Dowry and those who live it, who love its country, England, to whom it means the presence on earth of the values of the kingdom that is not of this world, of which England is in a way a portal, but far more – an incubator, a harbinger, an incarnator.

And for us, with clarity of principle, the courage of conviction and the vigour of purpose that can and will evangelise our beloved country, we will see her, I believe, in God’s good time take his word back to a Europe that has lost its way.

Such is the dowry and its meaning and mission for our time. 4/5/6.10.19 Whippingham

Cover image, The Dowry Tour of Our Lady of Walsingham to Leeds Catholic Cathedral. November 2019