Dear Paul,

What bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! As the statues fall, or are besieged, a new era is presaged in which the only statues left will be those of whom “we” approve. That seems to me at the heart of the difficulty with current affairs: who is the “we” who confer or withhold approval?

Having written a book highly critical of Churchill, indeed the first one which criticised his war leadership, I am hardly a keeper of the sacred flame, but when I see his statue under siege, the protesters remind me of Macaulay’s comment: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Whatever the rights and wrongs of a career spanning eight decades, to deface a monument to a man who helped defeat fascism in the name of “anti-fascism” seems close to entering Orwellian doublespeak territory.

Statues are erected after due processes of consultation, and in a civilised, democratic society, the same method can be used to remove them. Such processes were not available to those who tore down the statues of dictators, so those are not good precedents to call on for our own iconoclasts.

And for me, as a Catholic, that is where a deeper problem lies. We have been here before. So much of the beauty of the medieval church was destroyed in the name of “reform” at the time of the Reformation, and as we contemplate the “bare ruined choirs” I am reminded of the lament for Walsingham: “ Level, level, with the ground/ The towers do lie,/  Which, with their golden glittering tops,/ Pierced once to the sky.”

Best,
John

***

Dear John,

As a cradle Anglican I am aware that my religious roots were forged in a frenzy of iconoclasm. Which may be why I am relaxed about the piece of public theatre that got rid of the image of the slaver Edward Colston, erected by Victorians in a moment of Recessional-like retrenchment. Such very British iconoclasm didn’t end with the Reformation. A statue of “Butcher” Cumberland was removed from Cavendish Square in 1868, while in Ipswich a bronze image of Queen Victoria – who has a few statues – was melted down as recently as the Blitz, when total war trumped culture war. There are many other examples.

Some statues lift the heart. I often pass the compassionate Tory Samuel Johnson outside St Clement Danes, a man as vitriolic towards slavers as our young Bristolians. But it is at Whitehall that I am most moved, where the equestrian statue of Charles I looks down Whitehall towards his nemesis, Oliver Cromwell. AL Rowse claimed that “history is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised”, and sometimes it takes a poet to understand it. TS Eliot, in a time of immense national crisis, identified this eternal pairing of Cavalier and Roundhead, Whig and Tory, Conservative and Labour in our DNA, and set it not in stone but in words in “Little Gidding”. In times of challenge, these two dispositions, which often elide, are best “folded in a single party”, in which the “fire and the rose are one”. Eliot knew where he stood, but he understood, too, that in a national crisis we must stand together, or things fall apart.

Sincerely,
Paul

***

Dear Paul,

“The fire and the rose” are indeed one, and as Eliot reminds us in that same poem, a church is not there to inform curiosity, it is a place to kneel to worship God where “prayer has been valid”. And prayer is aided, for many of us, by ornaments and statues and icons. Their removal at the Reformation impoverished not only our cultural heritage, but also deprived future generations of the beauty of holiness we see in much of Catholic Europe.

No one has a problem with statues being removed in a democracy when it is done by the processes democracy provides. So removing Queen Victoria to help build Spitfires occasioned not a peep; but it seems unwise to equate a democratic process with mob rule.

What you say about the statues in Whitehall elicits a “Hear, hear” from me, but from some quarters there are demands to tear down the statue of Cromwell for his crimes against humanity in Ireland; if we are relaxed about Colston, should we be similarly exercised about the Lord Protector? At the time the statue was proposed, Irish nationalist MPs and many Liberals objected to it; in the end, having agreed to its erection, the Commons resiled from it under pressure, and it was only the deep pockets of Lord Rosebery that allowed it to be constructed. Should the Commons want to remove it, fine, but should a mob overthrow it, that, for me, is where the danger lies.

Best,
John

***

Dear John,

You are right about the important role in worship of statues, icons and other visual aids. Although the legacy of the English Reformation was a peerless liturgy of beauty and economy, it was much less so in the visual arts; though St Paul’s, for example, and numerous City churches suggest the Baroque, and curiously English, melding of High Anglicanism and Calvinism was not without visual aspiration.

But London’s architecture is no match for, say, Munich and Vienna, so compelling in their combination of Italianate gaiety and public display with Germanic rigour and profound seriousness. Unsurprisingly, both feature strongly on lists of the world’s most liveable cities, proof that conservatism, tradition and modernity are not exclusive to one another, and provide lessons in preservation. Lessons perhaps for the Conservative Party, who appear to have abandoned Tory ideals, never mind the tenets of Christian democracy, in favour of libertarianism and the alien certainties of US Republicanism.

Indeed, one of the concerns raised by the theatre at Bristol and elsewhere is how, despite appeals to European identity, Britain is drenched, if not drowning, in the culture of the US and the wars that derive from it, especially among the young. History, the civilising cultivation of scepticism and doubt, is in danger of being reduced to a Manichean struggle.

That is why Cromwell, for all his flaws, his crimes, and the contingent circumstances of the erection of his statue, should not fall. It is not that he was a “brave, bad man”, as Clarendon put it, but an integral part of a profound and tragic moment in our national history, for better or worse, along with his king, now both “united in the strife that divided them” as they gaze at one another. They, together and inseparable, remind us who we are.

Sincerely,
Paul

***

Dear Paul,

Your response raises some fascinating points. The peerless beauty of the King James Bible and Cranmer are indeed glories of the Anglican tradition; I wish they were more appreciated than they seem to be now. The bulky nature of Common Worship is no replacement, though a braver soul than I might argue that it provides that blending of the traditional and the modern to which you refer. When it comes to the modern Conservative Party and its curious addiction to liberal populism and American culture we shall, I suspect, agree.

The only minority group that has been explicitly proscribed from the political nation in this country are Catholics before 1829, and to this day no Catholic may become king or queen. More recent minorities, such as the Ugandan Asians, have been more swiftly welcomed into the public arena, but those tearing down statues are not, I think, going to commemorate Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, in celebratory imagery. When one sees, for example, that dreadful cartoon of her as a cow with a ring through her nose in that bastion of liberalism, the Guardian, it is clear that there is a nasty underside to much of the current furore.

You are correct to point out that diversity of thought and opinion have been central to our traditions, and that should include the right to erect and remove statue by due process. What causes me concern is that the loudest voices in the public square seem insistent on a sort of groupthink and public conformity. We have been here before, and your latest book reminds me that it isn’t worth revisiting.

Best,
John

***

Dear John,

I, too, wish the BCP and KJV (do those acronyms have purchase any more?) were more appreciated and better known, and not just because of their inherent aesthetic and theological qualities. History confined to the classroom and the lecture theatre remains, literally, academic. To create an understanding of themselves and a map towards their future, societies need common inheritances and institutions.

I am struck, for example, when I attend the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of the children of Jewish friends, nominally secular, by the way in which that community, which continues to face the vilest prejudice, connects with its deep past through ritual, demanding much of its young. Those demands were once made of many English children, me included, who connected to a language centuries older but ever renewed and ­ – contentious Anglican claim – continuous from the medieval Church. The foundation of any literary and historical understanding I have is rooted there. Collective, inherited rituals inspire and empower. It was the means by which a working-class child from an unpromising background could begin to make something of themselves.

As the husband and father of practising Catholics, I am aware of the prejudice aimed still towards the old faith, though now much more from secularists. Indeed, religious identity is a mystery to secularism, baffled by the conservatism, often grounded in religion, of many ethnic minorities, who fail to conform to the liberal ideal. Hence the bigotry faced by Priti Patel and any other prominent ethnic minority figure who fails to accept whatever political pieties are currently in play.

The voices of those who believe in a diverse, tolerant society, which can argue among itself in a civilised manner (is that not a disposition that the study of history should cultivate?) are not the loudest at the moment, but much of that opposing noise is obscurantist solipsism, utterly detached from mainstream debate. If decency holds its nerve, all may still be well.

Best wishes,
Paul

John Charmley is a historian and pro vice-chancellor at St Mary’s University; Paul Lay is editor of History Today and author of Providence Lost

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