Saint Charles King and Martyr
Hookers_Trick
8th Day Host, Admin Emeritus
Today is his feast day -- did anyone do anything? Is there still a mass at the Banqueting House (the SCKM site is woefully out of date)? I was curious if any of the churches dedicated to him keep it as their patronal. It appears Tunbridge Wells is doing nothing, keeping Sunday as Candlemas, although there is a 'King Charles Lecture' on Saturday (concerning the English harpsichord!). Falmouth, Shelland and Peak Forest yielded no discernible info online.
(it is probably a futile plea to ask Puritan sympathisers to avoid derailing this thread on the relative merits of St Charles).
(it is probably a futile plea to ask Puritan sympathisers to avoid derailing this thread on the relative merits of St Charles).
Comments
I doubt Peak Forest would do anything anyway: it's a tiny place and definitely a 'Sunday only' church.
Odd, really, given that the Commonwealth was big on English exceptionalism and fear of dastardly foreigners Catholics being in control. In my mind I associate Charles, King and Martyr with Jacobite sympathies, but that may be a Scottish perspective as the Scottish BCP was produced at his command and he strongly favoured Episcopal polity in Scotland, and the Scottish Bishops later remained loyal to his descendants.
We prayed for HMQ, and for the country as a whole, bearing in mind what is happening today...
I went to a Patronal Festival Evensong at KCM Tunbridge Wells many years ago - the theme of the Vicar's sermon was 'Forgiveness'. Make of that what you will!
The claim to martyrdom is really very, very doubtful. He was a very bad king, as is shown by what happened to the country during his reign and him at the end of it. He waged war on his own subjects. It was impossible to reach any sort of constitutional settlement with him because he believed that that his so called divine right, he was not bound by anything he said he agreed to.
It's not a day I mark.
An Episcopalian one, on the other hand, was famously (and negatively) labelled Mass in an incident that allegedly triggered the National Covenant and subsequent Bishops' Wars.
I wondered about that myself. Do we know for certain what type of service it was? Wikipedia suggests that it was the reading of the collects that triggered the outburst, which would fall near the end of morning prayer but close to the beginning of the order for Holy Communion.
I think that even Anglicans in England would not regularly have celebrated communion every week. It is extremely unlikely that the service which caused the riot in St Giles' would have been a communion service.
But anything at all which suggested that the clergyman was reading from a book would have been considered as rank popery.
One thing that can be said for Charles I is he united Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptist and more radical groups together over a single opinion. I think this is the only time that English Dissent unanimously agreed on anything. Unfortunately for him it was that Charles I was a bad thing.
I don't know enough about US law to know whether that's actually treasonous, but it is pretty odd. After all, I assume that Sunday by Sunday the TEC prays for Donald Trump and not Elizabeth II.
Or is there something about this that I'm missing?
Why would you think this treasonous? You seem to be arguing that members of the C of E (which over a long period fought a rather bloody war against Roman Catholicism) shouldn't venerate St Peter, St Gregory the Great, or St Clement, because they were Bishops of Rome.
I think it's odd, but that's because I think the whole cult of King Charles is odd. I don't think there's anything exceptionally odd about an American doing it.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=edYltrmBhKw
Mind you, I'm not sure we'd like Cromwell back, even though he did abolish that Christmas flummery...
Knox may have recommended it, but that was as far as it got. The Form of Prayers that he drew up in Geneva in 1556 says monthly. I seem to recall seeing somewhere that the frequency of celebration in towns in Scotland was monthly, but quarterly in more rural locales. CofE habits were different in that cathedral celebrated fairly frequently - weekly or fortnightly, but parish churches monthly at the most, more often six or four times a year.
Church services would not be covered by US law AFAIK. The only problem would be for those who had taken the oath to the US Constitution (legislators, office holders, military) whose presence at such an event would be ....untidy, even though Charles had nothing to do with the seceding colonies' actions.
I wouldn't call 49 an old man. Stubborn he certainly was.
A parliamentary democracy?! By what democratic process were the MPs elected? No, it was a military-backed revolutionary government that later gave way to a junta. Even if you were to accept the dubious proposition that parliament had some popular legitimacy then surely it must have lost much of that when it was purged by the army to ensure Charles could be tried and executed by the Rump Parliament many years later.
However flawed, Parliament, by this time just the House of Commons, always had more legitimacy than a hereditary tyrant convinced that he had a God-given right to rule us.
I'm not convinced that Charles was any more tyrannical than the government of the Commonwealth, nor that they had any more legitimacy after the purge.
Or, perhaps, as Sellar & Yeatman put it in 1066 and all that , the Cavaliers were Wrong, but Wromantic, whilst the Roundheads were Right, but Repulsive (I think that's the right way round!).
Besides, we’ve got two states named after King Charles I, who was the king of these colonies. I don’t think a church service here and there honoring him as a saint will raise any alarms of threats to the Republic.
Spot on.
Enoch, how can attending a service for a long dead person being remembered for supposed sanctity and martyrdom be treason? It involves no pledge of allegiance to him.
Personally, I think the whole cult of Charles, I, King and Martyr, is strange and a bit skewed in perspective to start with (though again, that’s not necessarily too unusual). But once one gets past the point of viewing him as a saint, I don’t see any particular problem with Americans venerating him as such.
I’m afraid you’re right about that.
That's putting it quite mildly, and politely, I think.
Their website is worth a look, though, and there does appear to have indeed been a service in Whitehall on 30th January:
skcm.org/feast-of-s-charles/
It's also not surprising that his cult got taken up by a certain strain of High Church Anglicans, given his religious attitudes. Unfortunately I can't find the service sheet from last week to see if we observed him, but St Quack's does mostly follow the RC calendar, so I suspect not.
An Anglo-Catholic precisionist did claim in the early C20 that the deletion of the services over 40 years previously had been illegal. As the state services were re-added by royal proclamation at each accession, if one's going to be that precise, as Edward VII did not re-proclaim them in 1901, whatever their status in Victoria's reign, they are abolished now.
I suppose I ought to apologise for this - but I don't. I associate the cult of Charles King and Martyr with affectation.
@Augustine the Aleut I take your reassurance that holding such a service is not actually treasonous. But then, how acceptable would it be in Springfield (Illinois) to hold a ceremony honouring the memory of Lenin, Stalin or the Great Helmsman (referencing Chairman Mao, not D Trump)?
The one at Tunbridge Wells, which I have attended occasionally, dates from the Restoration period (1676 IIRC), so is very much of its time. It was much altered in the 19thC, but is an attractive building, and well worth a visit. MOTR services, and excellent music!
That would have to be one of the more unfortunate political acronyms, right up there with CREEP.
I saw an opinion piece in(I think) the London Review Of Books a while back, chastising some Brexiteers for praising Henry VIII, especially focusing on Rees-Mogg and how Henry was supposedly xenophobic toward Catholics so how could a Catholic like JRM support someone like that.
It struck me that to think Henry VIII was an overall bad ruler is, in a way, to wish that the UK as we know it today didn't exist. I mean, I realize that all leaders leave some mark on how their country shapes up, but Henry's input was arguably a little more pivotal than most, in terms of establishing a core identity.
I'd personally be anti-Brexit if I were British, but I wondered if the writer of that article really considered the implications of what he was saying.
You've also got a state named after George III. I'd be curious to know if there are any American church services honoring his memory.