Short Cuts

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The London Review of Books:

On 23 January, Jacob Rees-Mogg reintroduced the country to the concept of prorogation – the suspension of Parliament by the monarch. Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next day at a Women’s Institute meeting in West Newton village hall, however, the queen herself appeared to suggest that she would prefer her subjects to sort this one out among themselves.

If even the queen wasn’t up for it, there probably wasn’t much of a constituency, outside the Rees-Moggs, for seeking salvation via the monarch. Or so I thought until an acquaintance mentioned that last year he had happened to attend the Mass for Charles I at Banqueting House, held every year on 30 January, the anniversary of the king’s beheading. His wife, who was helping with the music, had got him interested by saying that the hymns would include ‘O Holy King, Whose Severed Head’ by the Hon. Mrs Ermengarda Greville-Nugent. The sermon, he reported, ‘revolved around the notion that the constitution had been ruined since 1649, and that the common good required a reversion to the good old days of personal rule’. It had gone down well with the congregation, who had looked like members of Rees-Mogg’s extended family.

. . . .

Wednesday, 30 January was a cold day in Whitehall, and I can’t have been the only visitor to think of Charles I’s request for a second shirt so that he wouldn’t shiver on the scaffold outside Banqueting House. Inside, men in tailcoats with occult-looking lapel pins were setting up rows of seats under Rubens’s ceiling, which depicts a piously surprised James VI and I ascending into heaven on an eagle and an imperial globe. They were wandsmen, one of them told me, from St Paul’s, there to help with the ushering. At the back of the hall, highly variegated clergy were taking stock. Were they rivals or fellow travellers? A Russian Orthodox priest made cautious small talk with a young man in extravagant blue and red robes who turned out to be a follower of the Western Orthodox rite from a monastery near Dumfries. At 11.40 a.m., the wandsmen ushered the growing crowd into a tiny courtyard outside the front door. From time to time, perplexed tourists shuffled through the expectant congregants. At last a priest emerged and began to address us about the king’s self-sacrifice in the cause of episcopacy. I scanned the crowd for possible signs of its being the European Research Group at prayer. ‘Very male crowd’, I scribbled in my notebook. ‘Mutton-chop whiskers, chin beards, Van Dyke beards. Blue Lennon shades. Camel overcoats.’ The priest spoke of the king’s renunciation of his ‘earthly crown’, pronounced ‘crine’.

Link to the rest at The London Review of Books

PG is reminded of a statement by Harriet Vane in Dorothy Sayers’ book, Strong Poison:

If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.

4 thoughts on “Short Cuts”

  1. “Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus erudition.”

    There is nothing bogus about the erudition of either of these men. Boris Johnson won a scholarship to Eton, and then another to read Classics at Balliol, Oxford. As well as being a successful politician and Mayor of London, he’s written ten books. Jacob Rees-Mogg was an extremely successful businessman before becoming a politician, and is known for his intelligent, reasoned and articulate speeches.

  2. Since erudition and Oxford have been mentioned, I’m reminded of my favorite Oxford college, Simon Magus, the setting of Msgr. Ronald A. Knox’s wonderfully erudite novel “Let Dons Delight.” The story opens on the evening of June 31.

    (There is no typographical error in the above paragraph.)

Comments are closed.