This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
All appreciators of great literature and history have a unique bond with the small island between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, which provided outsized contributions to both. Chief among them is our blessed country, which like the British motherland is also being undone by domestic rot and feckless leadership, though the United Kingdom took far longer to reach the precipice, two thousand years rather than two hundred. The UK also has something the U.S. lacks: an unbroken human link to its origin, the Monarchy. And while we may rightly applaud this contrast as the whole point of America, the British Crown proved its worth last week with a graceful video from one of its members, Catherine (Kate), Princess of Wales.
England’s in name only Conservative Party … faces a well-deserved electoral “bloodbath” by the even worse Labor Party.
I became a devout anglophile and pseudo-monarchist when I read one of my first books, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle. To us boys in the century before the internet, Robin Hood was the ultimate hero, a romantic survivalist outlaw leader who fought evildoers and government tyranny yet never forgot his loyalty to king (Richard I “the Lionheart,” 1157-1199) and country. We didn’t have a king, but something about fidelity to a noble ruler struck a chord in us. Much like identifying with beautiful princesses did for girls, as Walt Disney richly discovered long before the company he built betrayed his vision of them. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Midway in the Culture War)
My boyhood love for Pyle’s book led me to his second most famous work, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Here was a portal to an entire universe and connected ideals: chivalry, honor, romance, Christianity, and civilization versus darkness, both substantial and supernatural. King Arthur’s Camelot — essentially England — was an oasis of law and order which, by manly derring-do, kept the surrounding, relentless barbarism at bay. Until Camelot too, like Britain and potentially America, fell to internal corruption and immorality, in its case the queen’s affair with a champion knight.
But from despair arose eternal spiritual hope in the knights’ Quest for the Holy Grail, the Chalice in which Christ turned wine into his Holy Blood at the Last Supper. Perhaps not by coincidence, this sacred ritual and event were celebrated just last weekend on Palm Sunday. In any case, Christianity plays a fundamental role in the literature about King Arthur, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Anonymous, late 14th Century) through Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1485) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetic Idylls of the King (1859-1885).
Unsurprisingly, most modern interpretations of Arthurian legend on page (The Once and Future King [1938] by T. H. White, The Crystal Cave [1970] by Mary Stewart), stage (Camelot), and screen (Knights of the Round Table [1953], Prince Valiant [1954], Camelot [1967], Excalibur [1981], First Knight (1995), Merlin [TV series 2008-2012]) diminish or disappear the Christianity. An exception is Stephen R. Lawhead’s superb The Pendragon Cycle (Taliesin, Merlin, Arthur, Pendragon, Grail, Avalon) being given the rare reverential adaptation by Daily Wire Entertainment and set to premiere this fall on Dailywire.com.
But the reason for the religious reduction in new versions of Britain’s heroic epic is obvious. The cultural overlords despise Christianity as an obstacle to their progressivism. They prefer their fantasy on the pagan side, such as Game of Thrones and TV’s woke anti-Tolkien The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. So young people will have nothing to grasp onto during the current national deconstruction, like we did Robin Hood and King Arthur, then later Sherlock Holmes, Gunga Din, the Charge of the Light Brigade, The Prisoner of Zenda, Simon Templar, and James Bond — Fleming’s and Connery’s Bond, not the asexual mope Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig made of him.
They won’t even have the Church of England, the country’s spiritual glue for five centuries, now a collapsing house of cards instead of God. Earlier this month, Church leaders urged wealthy donors to raise one-billion pounds to “address past wrongs of slavery.” (READ MORE: When Rightist Eyes Are Smiling)
That the Church was a dominant force in making England one of the first nations to end slavery with the “Abolition of Slavery Act” (1833), and throughout its vast empire, means nothing to the liberal activist fools now running it. Take Archdeacon of Liverpool Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, who recently posted this unifying message on X: “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender. So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy.”
Threlfall-Holmes and her peers doubtless have little appreciation for the wonderful Christian hymn, Amazing Grace, by slave-ship captain turned abolitionist Anglican clergyman John Newton. Because no committee for slavery reparations will match the power of its lyrics: “Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear/And Grace my fears relieved/How precious did that Grace appear, the hour I first believed.”
Yet today, as England’s in name only Conservative Party — overwhelmingly voted in by the people to do the opposite of what they’re doing, like letting in three times the number of immigrants this year as in 2020, the majority of them Muslims — faces a well-deserved electoral “bloodbath” by the even worse Labor Party. The grace and class of a beauteous princess announcing her cancer diagnosis is a small comfort reminiscent of an olden time.
