History, Faith, and the Future

“The history of increasing depravity and declining faith, of reforms earnestly demanded, feebly attempted, and deferred too long, is told by Mr Creighton with a fullness of accuracy unusual in works which are the occupation of a lifetime.”

This judgement upon Mandell Creighton‘s multi-volume History of the Papacy in the Period of Reformation by no less a figure than the famous Catholic historian Harold Lord Acton (the 13th Marquis of Groppoli) can well serve to introduce a figure who was soon to become the Bishop of Peterborough, a diocese which had at the time 750 parishes.

It was further said of Bishop Creighton that he firmly “believed that to be English was to be Anglican, and to regard dissenters as having lost their way and Roman Catholics as disloyal.” Nonetheless, he  held that the real Catholic Church comprised a collection of churches which included the Church of England, the Church of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church—while being firm in asserting Anglican doctrine as set out in the Book of Common Prayer as what should be fully maintained.

Bishop Creigton had a profound commitment to the establishment of the Church of England, which he saw “as the soul of the nation” and as having before it no less a prospect, in the nineteenth century, than “the conquest of the world”.

It was that particular phrase Creigton’s about the  “soul of the nation” that came to mind –when I had occasion this last week to visit Westminster Abbey.

There can be no other building in Britain which speaks more profoundly to the complex course of English history and to the central place of the Christian faith –and the place of the church in England, within it –than the Abbey Church of St Peter in Westminster.

A particular highpoint of the occasion was the private visit to the Shrine of St Edward the Confessor who was so central to the construction of the present building. That history goes all the way back to what was then called Thorney Island in middle of the Thames, where a small Benedictine community had been established around the tenth century. It was King Edward the Confessor who first rebuilt that modest monastery as a royal church, consecrated in 1065, immediately before the Norman invasion of 1066 –deliberately situating his palace and chapel together so that kingship and sanctity would be forever thereafter both physically and spiritually intertwined.

It was Thomas Hobbes who wrote that it is ‘of our conceptions of the past, we make a future’ and no words are more apposite when we turn to the astonishing witness to the life and faith that is Westminster Abbey.

Since the coronation of William, the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066, every English and then British monarch has been crowned in Westminster Abbey, an unbroken liturgical thread that binds nearly a millennium of political history to a single altar and chair. It was part of the genius of Henry III’s thirteenth‑century rebuilding of the Abbey to reshape the church as a Gothic stage for the rites and trappings of monarchy. This firmly conjoined all the aspects in ceremonial expression of monarchy and government church and state. It has served continuously as the place of national focus for the most solemn moments of national life from coronations to burials within a sacred architecture of dedicated space.

The “Coronation Chair,” commissioned by Edward I to house the Stone of Scone, embodies this fusion of English and Scottish destinies in a single sacramental object, so that the act of anointing a monarch also enacts the union of kingdoms. The Abbey thereby became what one modern historian has called “a church in history,” a place where the drama of state – from coronations to royal weddings and funerals – is performed before God, in a liturgical idiom that both sacralizes and counterpoints merely secular power – achieving thereby an expression of constitutional richness not purely secular space or ceremony could ever attempt or sustain.

Royal Peculiar and nexus of Crown, Church and State

In 1560 Queen Elizabeth I refounded the Abbey as the Collegiate Church of St Peter, am action that marked the transition of this Abbey of Westminster, into a “Royal Peculiar” placed under the direct jurisdiction of the sovereign (and Supreme Governor of the Church of England) rather than any diocesan bishop. This established in law the intimate bond between Crown and this particular church that has endured ever since.

That status means that the Abbey is not simply another cathedral but is an entirely unique constitutional and liturgical space where the monarch’s authority is both exercised and exhibited while also shown as bounded within rites, oaths and worship Westminster Abbey thus functions as a physical articulation of Britain’s unwritten constitution. It is where the monarch swears to govern according to the laws and customs of the realm, and where Parliament and people periodically gather in and commit to — state services that dramatize the mutual obligations of all in the nation as ruler and ruled. The Abbey thus stands “at the heart of the monarchical, ecclesiastical and national life of the country,” where its ceremonies enact and frame the invisible ultimate realities of the British constitution and governance.

Poets, scientists and the making of a national canon

The famous south transept’s “Poets’ Corner” began almost by accident, with the burial of Geoffrey Chaucer, who was first interred there as a royal servant rather than as England’s first great vernacular poet. Over time, the clustering of graves and memorials to writers such as Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson transformed this corner into a stone anthology, where literary excellence is canonized in marble and brass. Similarly, the burial of scientists commemorates those of global renown such as Newton, and Darwin, down to the more recent Stephen Hawking.

Among those buried in the Abbey are
Edward I
Edward III
Richard II
Henry V
Henry II
James I
James II
Queen Elizabeth I
Queen Mary I
Queen Mary of Scotland
Charles II
Queen Anne
King William III
King Edward II
King George II  (the last Monarch to be buried there)
Queen Caroline II

The Unknown Warrior

Another deeply eloquent symbol of the Abbey’s role in Britain’s self‑understanding is the grave of the Unknown Warrior. A nameless British soldier from the First World War was buried in the nave with full military honors in 1920. Thus does the ceremonial of state bow before an anonymous sacrifice: and down to the present day kings and queens and foreign heads of state customarily lay wreaths here, acknowledging that national life is sustained by unrecorded lives that paid the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. This enacts a theology of remembrance and anamnesis in which, the dead speak powerfully and reframe the more modest perspective of regular daily life by reminding us of the price which can be called from us to sustain it and the freedoms we enjoy.

Architecture as theology in stone

Architecturally, and more widely as a building, Westminster Abbey is an architectural Gothic masterpiece of the 13th to 16th centuries, whose soaring nave, intricate stonework and stained glass create a hugely evocative environment of light, and elegant proportion.

Henry III’s re-construction brought in the latest French Gothic forms but translated them into a particularly English idiom, one that places the shrine of a sainted king at its heart and organizes royal tombs and chapels in concentric rings around that sacred centre creating a space in which the building itself unfolds and witnesses to a kind of moral and historical narrative for the nation.

A Living church and place of daily prayer and worship

Yet it is important to remember too that despite its monumental character, Westminster Abbey also remains a working church with a continuing daily round of Offices and of liturgy and choral music.

 This is a witness that has continued for more than a thousand years. This continuity prevents the Abbey from becoming a mere museum: the same psalms and prayers that once framed medieval monastic life now frame its daily still,  as well as the grand state occasions and tourist visits —  reminding always that daily liturgy is the central key to the spiritual life of the building.

This again means that there is a catechetical aspect witnessing to the nation, unfolding a story in which the Gospel, the Crown and the achievements of the people commemorated are interwoven,

Thus too does it remind that the ultimate horizon of Britain’s self‑understanding remains theological rather than merely political and this-worldly. As one contemporary reflection from a British Academy lecture has argued, Westminster Abbey’s significance lies not only in what it has witnessed in the past, but in how it continues to present deep meaning within society, shaping “the way we think about our history and ourselves.”

A further note about Bishop Mandell Creigton

His liking for vestments and penchant for pageantry was notable but qualified, since it was also said that this “should not lead people to suppose he was entirely sympathetic to ritualism”. As he observed to one priest upon the subject of incense, evidently “you think that souls like herring cannot be cured without smoke?” (See Covert, James A Victorian Marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton. London, 2000).

When he was honored with an invitation to deliver the highly prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 1896, he found it hard to settle on a topic which, as he put it, would occupy an hour without boring people too much” so he eventually plumped for what he called ‘a frivolous subject’, namely ‘The English national character’ a slightly surprising turn of phrase which points to the fact that he was highly erudite but also dispassionate.

While he saw himself as primarily an historian of action rather than of the ideas which he found to drive the work of Lord Acton, he still felt it right to reflect a certain moral perspective, as when—while writing his third volume on the Papacy, he wrote that, working on the Borgias was like “spending one’s day in a low police court”.

But he also made a distinction that remains of importance through being emphatic that public figures should be judged for their public and not their private actions.

Thus, he coined a phrase which the much later Archbishop Welby might have found it helpful to remember: “I like to stand upon clear grounds which can be proved and estimated. I do not like to wrap myself in the garb of outraged dignity because men in the past did things contrary to the principles which I think soundest in the present” (1905)   

Nonetheless, G. P. Gooch wrote of him that ‘he had no theories, no philosophy of history, no wish to prove or disprove anything’ (Gooch, in History and Historians in the 19th Century, 2nd edn., 1952, , p. 349.) a perspective which marked him out as very much a modern historian who was far removed from those of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century for whom the only respectable justification for the study of the past was that it could be of service to the present.

In those earlier times, the case for recalling the past was a practical one. History was a great repository of experience from which useful lessons could be drawn. This assumption “united the theologians, the moralists who saw its examples of virtuous conduct, and the ‘politic’ historians, who looked to it as a source for maxims of statecraft”.  (Keith Thomas, in his chapter, “The perception of the past in early modern England”: in The Creighton Century, 1907-2007, David Bates, Jennifer Wallis, Jane Winters (Eds) London 2009)

Nonetheless, we do well to heed the words quoted earlier above of Thomas Hobbes who wrote that it is ‘of our conceptions of the past, we make a future’ and no words are more apposite when consider the continuing roll therefore of Westminster Abbey.