17 November is the feast day of St Gregory Thaumaturgus, patron saint of desperate, forgotten, impossible and lost causes.
Gregory was born in Neocaesarea, now the city of Niksar in northern Turkey. The name “Neoceasarea” is a sensible adoption to keep the favour of the monarch, and so Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret must have thought in 1664 when they signed off
The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, to and With All and Every the Adventurers and All Such as Shall Settle or Plant There
Berkeley and Carteret had received their separate portions of what would become the state from the Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II and in time the last catholic monarch of England.
But the better date to mark the lost cause of a Catholic England is just over a century before.
17 November 1558 marks the beginning of the Elizabethan age, the age of Shakespeare, the defeat of the Spanish armada, the embrace of Britannia, the incorporation of the East India Company, and all in all the foundation of an Anglophone world.
What it also marks is the death of Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary. She had her own first – she was the first queen regnant, ie reigning as a female in her own right – but failed in her attempt to set aside the Church of England. Her husband, by the bye, was the same Philip who would launch the armada 30 years later. King of England first, king of Spain later.
Beneath this well-known death is the death 12 hours later on 17 November 1588 of Reginald Pole, last catholic archbishop of Canterbury.
What is fascinating about Pole is the fate of his family. When Pole had failed to facilitate the means for Henry VIII to get rid of Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother, and to instal Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, and after Pole had started to lobby for an embargo against England, Henry took his revenge against Pole’s family.
And this was not just another family. Pole’s mother was among the last of the Plantagenets, the house which ceased its rule with the victory of Henry’s father at the Battle of Bosworth Field. When Henry had procured her execution, he had done so not merely as, but because he was, the second monarch of the house of Tudor and the son of Pole’s mother’s first cousin Elizabeth of York.
The Pole matriarch left her mark, apart from being beatified in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII.
Her great-great-grandson Sir John Bouchier was one of the regicides of Charles I, himself great-great-grandnephew of Henry VIII and father of the abovementioned Charles and James.
One of her other sons, Geoffrey, married Constance Pakenham, the family who would produce the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law Edward Pakenham. He was killed in action in 1815 leading the English at the Battle of New Orleans.
The irony is that the matriarch’s title – Countess of Salisbury – would fall forfeit with her execution and only be revived in favour of Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth’s chief adviser and himself a close advisor of James I, heir to Elizabeth and father of the aforementioned Charles I.
This family mess reaches into us all. Barbara Tuchman founds her great work on the blooding of democracy, The Proud Tower, in the blood spilt by the Tudors over 300 years before:
The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895…
The Prime Minister was a Marquess and lineal descendant of the father and son who had been chief ministers to Queen Elizabeth and James I…
Planted firmly across the path of change, operating warily, shrewdly yet with passionate conviction in defence of the existing order, was a peer who was Chancellor of Oxford University for life, had twice held the India Office, twice the Foreign Office and was now Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line.
