Tea at Trianon: The Once and Future Prayer Book

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 19, 2023

The Once and Future Prayer Book

The Book of Common Prayer. From The American Conservative:

The book itself was once banned entirely from use by the Republican Roundheads after they had beheaded King Charles I in 1649. Yet it continued in secret use, like samizdat books in the old USSR. The great ghost-story writer M.R. James, in his clever tale The Uncommon Prayer Book, refers to a 17th century legend that there was a special anti-Cromwell edition of the prayer book, secretly printed in 1653 by defiant monarchists. For April 25, which is both St Mark’s Day and the birthday of Oliver Cromwell, it is said to have prescribed the reading of Psalm 109, much of which is a furious, vengeful curse beginning with the words “Set thou an ungodly man to be ruler over him” and getting more savage as it goes on. If you ever find such a book, in some musty chapel or church untouched by the centuries, my advice is to leave it where you find it, and steal away softly. It may be haunted.

By contrast, the 1928 Prayer Book of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA (as it then called itself) contains an explicitly republican prayer for the President of the United States (“O Lord our Governor, whose glory is in all the world…”) and substitutes “O Lord, save the State” for “O Lord, save the King.” In Ireland, since four-fifths of the island became a republic in 1949, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland’s 1926 book has had different prayers for each jurisdiction. In the six counties of Northern Ireland, at Evensong (for example in St Columb’s Cathedral in Londonderry, a couple of miles from the invisible border) it prays for the King. In the rest of Ireland, for example at lovely St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, it petitions more vaguely “O Lord, guide and defend our Rulers.”

The essentially modern nature of republics is exposed in the Irish prayer book’s blander, more utilitarian attempt at a prayer for a mere President: “Almighty God, who rulest over the nations of the world; We commend to thy merciful care the people of this land, that, being guarded by thy providence, they may dwell secure in thy peace.” Anglicans in republics are also deprived of the tremendous prayer for the King’s Majesty: “O Lord our heavenly father, high and mighty, king of kings, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth.” (Read more.)