Tomb of Richard III The View
Martin Mansergh
An Irish Independent headline earlier this month on an article about Pope Francis’ forthcoming visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families declared: ‘Pope will find no tales of princes of the Church in his choice of venues’. The focus would be on the poor, the homeless, and the marginalised, on those left out or behind, and on family ideals valuable to most people, in other words the original mission of Christianity and indeed of St Francis, whose name Pope Francis has taken.
For much of the 20th Century, powerful prelates, even in Ireland, were sometimes metaphorically described as ‘princes of the Church’, not here because of any ostentation that they displayed, but because of the immense unquestioned authority that they wielded over many spheres of life.
On a visit to England a couple of weeks ago that took in a number of religious sites and buildings, crossing the Pennines I was faintly startled to see a road sign announcing entry into Co. Durham, sub-titled ‘Home of the Prince Bishops’.
Enquiry
On further enquiry, I learnt that the mediaeval bishops of Durham exercised secular jurisdiction that included a Palatine court that survived till 1836.
The 2nd Duke of Ormonde on two occasions lost his Palatine court in Tipperary, latterly housed in the Main Guard, Clonmel, recently restored. The first time in 1689 was at the hands of the Patriot Parliament after he deserted James II for William of Orange. The second and final time was when he turned Jacobite in 1715, soon after the Whigs took over with the accession of the Hanoverian George I. Such were the vicissitudes of politics, when it was so easy to lose one’s footing.
To revert to the Bishop of Durham, who had a fine cathedral, he lived in a castle, and in 1832 the incumbent founded the university there.
Of course, the real Prince Bishops belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. Three of the seven electors fixed since 1237 were Elector Archbishops, of Cologne, Mainz and Trier. In the 18th Century, Clemens August of Cologne built a magnificent rococo-style Schloss Brühl with park modelled on Versailles, though not on the same scale, which we visited as a family several times, when I was posted to the Irish Embassy in Bonn in the mid-1970s.
Another Prince Archbishop but not an elector Hieronymus von Colloredo of Salzburg features in the life of Mozart, whom he dismissed from his service for insolence. Mozart’s behaviour was part of growing impatience with the social rigidity of the ancien régime that classified a court composer, even if he were a genius, as a servant. Colloredo got his final come-uppance from another upstart, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The principality was secularized in 1803 as part of the impending dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. As French-convent-educated Eleanor Butler from Kilkenny Castle, one of the ostensibly reclusive Ladies of Llangollen, complained: “Fatally spreads the pestilential taint of insubordinate principles.”
Some clergy are apt to maintain at times that church buildings are not the essence of Christianity. At one level, that is true, and at times of persecution worship had to move underground or be improvised, as, for example, at Mass rocks in penal times. Yet churches of all types and ages, simple or elaborate, have helped to provide a setting and focus for religious devotion and loyalty, and are often inspirational in their own right.
Often, they have also conveyed a political message. An illustrated guide, The Story of Norwich Cathedral, says about its construction in the 12th Century: “The Cathedral was intended to overwhelm the English with the power and divine favour enjoyed by their Norman conquerors.”
Nearby in Norfolk, the towering remaining archway of Walsingham Abbey, in the Middle Ages a place of pilgrimage second only to Canterbury, is today associated with all denominations, even Muslims, but in particular with a High Church Anglicanism that celebrates Mass.
Henry VIII in his Defender of the Faith days pilgrimed there, but then, despite the Abbey’s prompt acceptance of his supremacy, had it destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries, because this did meet with resistance. Peterborough Cathedral, previously an abbey, was luckier. Henry’s unjustly discarded wife Katharine of Aragon is buried there, with the resonant words “humble and loyal” written on her tomb.
A new royal tomb has been created in Leicester Cathedral for the recently rediscovered and identified remains of Richard III killed in battle, following masterly interdisciplinary forensic work by the University. The extensive plinth of the tomb is Kilkenny marble, Leicestershire being twinned with Kilkenny.
Though a famous Shakespearean villain for disappearing rival members of his family, unlike the Tudors, he did not subordinate the Irish Parliament with Poynings Law, dissolve the monasteries, or in attempting to impose a settler faith lay waste to much of the land and the people. The charter he granted to Galway in 1484 was celebrated 500 years on in 1984.
Other rulers, up to today, were involved in the disappearance of family, notably Catherine the Great, who, because she courted progressive philosophical opinion, suffered little opprobrium.
The increasingly materialist age of the Enlightenment ended up badly, discredited by the Terror during the French revolution and the ‘reason of state’ behind three cynical partitions of Poland, which saw its disappearance in 1795 from the map till 1918. Catholicism did much to sustain Poland and Ireland through long dark periods and to help them regain real independence and national dignity.
A remarkable Polish exhibition on the story of Consul Dobrzynski was shown recently in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. He represented in Dublin a government that fell victim, first to Nazi and then to Soviet occupation.
He saw the necessity for the fragmented states created post-1918 to come together for their survival. Despite neutrality, de Valera deeply sympathised with countries being crushed by bigger neighbours, which is why he held that the international rule of law was so important for smaller countries. Other times other values.