A luminous day with British monarchy, as part of a birthday visit to the Tower, where I sat on sweeps of grass in what used to be the moat there, for keeping dissent at bay, and I watched a brief, daft ‘Princess Bride’-style adaption of one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Corn, Saturday morning television. And why not? There comes a point when a text is so far from the current generation’s ethics, signifiers, sense of meaning and psychology, so damn old, that it needs new self-awareness.
What is the background? The background is a Norman colonial power base turned into an educative day centre. A dungeon with racks and manacles, the closest thing Britain had to Alcatraz or Auschwitz, now selling mint humbugs in leather flagons. A village green to execute heretics, Catholics, Protestants (depending on the wind’s turn), problem heirs. Prisoners, poisoners. Rumours of a Celtic king buried under the hill, with muscular, glossy ravens to protect his soul (now we’re getting somewhere. A thousand years of fleur-de-Lys is nothing, Geoff. Give us history.)
We need a king who kills, I thought. Enough of these rebranded glad-handing Hanoverians. Bring back aquiline Plantagenet necks and ruthless armoured cranks playing hard and paranoid (maybe it’s a birthday thing). Monarchs, I concluded, examining Charles II’s girly gold spurs behind some three foot thick Fort Knox doors in the Waterloo Block, and the filigreed spoon used to anoint the hands, head, and heart of every monarch, incarnate one aspect of F. Nietzsche’s Übermensch. They’re the humble proposal that a certain brand of advanced person could, if they had to live their life again and again, eternally return for the same thing, and not go mad, not end up screaming. They’d positively welcome it. If you don’t fancy living forever you just aren’t playing power right. Kill or be killed is what living is. Not some soundless, bovine melt in an old folks’ home. Life isn’t about the joy of touching a leaf with a wet cheek. It’s executing your wife in the French style, the vertebrae cleaved so cleanly and swiftly that her lips still pray on the ground.
My Yeoman Warder and guide seemed to shoot with a Protestant foot, for he could hardly say ‘Lady Jane Grey’ without a knuckle at his lip. Low ebb in history, he whispered. A sixteen year old academic with no ambition to be Queen, made Queen and then beheaded, thrown under a slab here, with no friends or priest in attendance. The Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula is the best part of the Tower of London. No Westminster Abbey, just the infamous and unwanted, the headhunted.
Even Beefeaters admit that the royal line has been hijacked and bastardised, that history advanced in spite of them, from gang lords to brand extenders, and that Nietzsche’s ‘Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul’ is just a state of mind. How do shifting and capricious figureheads turn an anti-imperialist religion into divine right? St Paul’s epistle to the Romans bottles it by Ch13: “Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil”, “The authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
‘The Knight’s Tale’ features two imprisoned cousins, both favoured by a different Roman God, who fall in love with the same woman glimpsed through their cell window. There are spats, escapes, returns, but eventually their holder, Theseus the duke of Athens, orders that they duel for her hand. Not individually but with a hundred men apiece. The narrative highlights inherent problems in polytheism. Gods with differing agendas and differing players will cause disagreements in heaven to be reflected as wars on earth. Oh, how the world’s troubles might be ended if only one God could reign supreme. Kill for peace, then, and convert at sword-point! Ladies are passive territory to be won; only a silenced Emily questions it, in prayer. I thought that Mars and Venus might intervene to stop the bloodshed but no such comedy joy. Werre! What be the godnesse of it? Absolutli no thinge. Seye it agayn!
The Tower of London village has about 130 inhabitants, the youngest being six months, and its own doctor and a new Canon, the Rev Roger Hall. Passing the windowsills of his 1749 add-on I caught what looked like a selection of Kinder Egg toys and, above, in his bedroom, he seemed to employ one of those feathery dreamcatchers. Are dreamcatchers compatible with the grace of the Lord Almighty? I doubt that Kinder Eggs are blasphemous, even this close to Easter. But I did think that ‘religious’ these days doesn’t mean what it used to. We don’t beat ourselves or bury our foes in quicklime. Long before ‘discrimination’ was our main concern there were ‘souls’ and ‘heaven’ to consider. “Are you a spiritual person?” an exit gate market researcher took me aside for a tailored set of questions. I got the feeling the Tower Village was being turned into a kind of Vatican City for dreamcatcher faiths, for all faiths, Charles III style. Perhaps this will be its next incarnation.
