“The evolution and persistence of the commemoration of Charles King and Martyr”
“And there are aching solitary breasts, Whose widow'd walk with thought of thee is cheer'd, Our own, our royal saint: thy memory rests On many a prayer, the more for thee endear'd.” (John Keble. ‘King Charles the Martyr’. The Christian year: thoughts in verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the years. 1869) This regicide, which we commemorate tonight, is commemorated in a surprising number of churches, which witnesses to the continuity and survival of the observance into the twenty-first century. For many Anglicans this continued observance is regarded either with indifference or as an embarrassment. What relevance, they ask; does a not particularly attractive seventeenth-century king have for the twenty-first century? Does not such an observance burden the church with historical baggage, which prevents it from witnessing effectively to the modern world? There is nothing new in such attitudes; by the end of the seventeenth century voices were raised questioning not just the appropriateness of the commemoration, but even the claim that Charles was anything more than a failed tyrant. Such questions lay behind a report commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1957, published under the title the commemoration of saints and heroes of the faith in the Anglican Communion. This report is, to date, the most complete statement of the theological position of the Church of England in regard to the recognition and honouring of saints and martyrs. The report rejected any need for a bureaucratic procedure within the Church of England similar to that of Rome, and suggested instead a return to an older tradition where saints were `home grown'. In other words, commemoration developed spontaneously from the `grass-roots' and was then given sanction by the church. Using this model, Charles was an ideal type of Anglican saint, spontaneously venerated by the faithful — a !1