I like this guy. There aren't a whole lot of English Lutherans. I'm not one either. Huh? Well, my ancestors are from Suffolk, and I professed the Lutheran faith, taught in Scripture and correctly stated in the Book of Concord, when I was 46. Close enough. At least to really admire Robert Barnes. Not just for what he did but moreso for what we can learn from it now for us. To see what that is, let's get into what he did and his times.
I. Who Is Robert Barnes And Who Are The English?
Robert Barnes was born about 1495 in Lynn, formally Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England. Norfolk, Suffolk -- that's the North folk and the South folk of East Anglia, once its own kingdom, named after ourselves, the Angles, who are named in turn from where we came, Angeln, or Anglia in the international language of the day, Latin, in the modern state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, way up North damn near, er, just South of, Denmark.
Before us, a Brythonic tribe called the Iceni lived in the area. Who are the Brythons? A Celtic tribe whose land it was before we, the Saxons, the Danes, the Vikings and yet more starting piling in. It's from them that we get the words Britain, British, etc. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 BC, called the place Brittania after the Brythons, and as they did in many places, left the local stuff pretty much alone so long as they obeyed the Roman governors. Despite revolts here and there, including the great one by the Iceni queen Boudica, they held out until about 400 AD. That's when the Saxons from Germany moved in, uninvited, the bleeders.
We were invited. The Iceni ended up pretty much wiped out, but in 433 the Brythons asked us if we'd like to come over and settle since things were getting a bit sparse, and help against the Picts too. How about that -- in a world history of pretty much conquer and re-conquer everywhere, we were invited to come! We Angles are all like that -- just look at the irenic tone, the stepping back from controversy, the staid measured writing style, for which I am known throughout the Lutheran blogosphere. Anyway, about 520, the North folk and the South folk united to form the Kingdom of East Anglia, one of seven kingdoms that emerged in what would become the United Kingdom, literally.
East Anglia is called such to this day as a region of England, generally also including Cambridgeshire to the West and often Essex to the South too. Anglia is the root of the words England and English for the whole thing and its language, East Anglian or not.
Lynn, in Norfolk, shows its Celtic origins in that the name simply means "lake" in Celtic. Robert Barnes was born there, and went to Cambridge for the university there, where he was associated with the Augustinian friars, same as Luther. Ah Cambridge. Seems that in 1209, some Oxford scholars got upset at the hanging of two Oxford scholars by the town for murder and rape of locals, so they went to the school at Cambridge and turned it into a university, the second oldest in the English speaking world. Ah, the pure pursuit of learning, when academic freedom also included no prosecution for murdering and raping locals. Call it academic immunity. Talk about town and gown! Well, at least there actually is a bridge over a river Cam.
II. So How Does An English Guy End Up Reading A German Reformer?
Anyway, Barnes also hung out at the White Horse Tavern, aka White Horse Inn, in Cambridge where starting about 1521 groups met to discuss Luther and his thought, including Thomas Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, William Tyndale, and others. Because of their interest in the ideas coming from Germany, the group got the nickname "the Germans". Damn, wish I was there.
In 1523 he graduated Doctor of Divinity, or Divinitatis doctor, from Cambridge. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1525, Barnes preached an openly Lutheran sermon, at St Edward's church in Cambridge. He was brought up on charges, examined by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey -- a Suffolk boy, from Ipswich -- Lord Chancellor to the King, Henry VIII, and ended up being sent to jail in 1526.
He escaped two years later, made his way to Antwerp and then Wittenberg, where he met Luther and was his house guest. I'm guessing they spoke Latin to each other. Maybe he learned German, like me, hanging around with the fellas. Damn, wish I was there too. While there, as Luther noted in his work to be mentioned below, he used neither his title nor his name, enrolling simply as Antonius Anglus (there's the Angle thing again).
In 1536 he was able to return to England, working as a liaison between the English government and Lutheran rulers and churchmen in Germany. In 1535 they sent him back to Germany, to get Lutheran support for Henry's efforts to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and Henry's vision of reformation in England. He didn't get it, and Henry never forgot it. Catherine of Aragon was really Catalina de Aragon. What does this mean? (If you're Lutheran and ain't laughing, oh well.)
III. So Why Was An English Guy Reading A German Reformer A Big Deal?
Oh boy here we go. Now Catalina was married to Henry's older brother Arthur, who was supposed to become king, being the first son of Henry VII, but he died before his dad (predeceased him, if you like it put that way) so Henry became the heir. This was a big deal. Henry VII claimed descent from the legendary King Arthur and said his son would restore the glory days of the equally legendary Camelot, and thus named him Arthur. And to bolster his kingdom against the French by an alliance with Spain, just recently united under Isabela I de Castilla and Fernando II de Aragon, a marriage was arranged when Arthur was 2 between him and their daughter Catalina.
Henry VII had another problem too. None of the other European monarchs recognised him as a real king -- you know, by birth. He became king by his victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Hill in the "War of the Roses", between the House of Lancaster, which he as Henry Tudor led, and the House of York, of which Richard III was the last English king, since he not only lost the battle but was killed in it. Well hell, Richard had become king by taking power from his nephew King Edward V, who was just twelve and, um, disappeared after Richard took power, but they were born to this stuff so it's OK. Henry Tudor wasn't.
Not only that, his great grandfather on his mother's side, guy named John Beaufort, was a bastard. No, not that kind, born out of wedlock. Now John's dad, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was indeed the third son of Edward III, but he did not lock in wed with John's mother, Katherine Swinford, his mistress of some 25 years, until after John and three other kids were born, and even at that she was his third wife. Which made the kids legitimate, but not eligible for the throne because they were not legitimate by birth.
So here's Henry Tudor with his claim to the throne, all other claimants from the House of Lancaster dead in battle, murdered, or executed, resting on military victory, with an illegitimate ancestor by birth, and not on the male side of his ancestry. That's why all the stuff about jumping over all that to the legendary King Arthur. And also why Catalina as queen would make the House of Tudor accepted as for real by all the other kings and queens. Catalina was actually of descent from the House of Lancaster, and was named after Catherine of Lancaster, her great grandmother and a legitimate daughter of John of Gaunt and his wife Constance of Castile, who was his second wife but that's OK as his first, Blanche, died of the Bubonic Plague two years before they were married, so there's a wrap on that.
Catalina had all the cards to make everything OK. Not only that, she was enormously well though of in all respects: highly educated, devoutly Catholic, privately critical of many of the moral abuses and superstitions the Lutherans condemned but nonetheless had no time for Luther or the Lutherans, and was a lay member of the Franciscan Order. That's what's called a secular tertiary, meaning a lay member of the third order, the first order being friars (OFM, Order of Friars Minor, there ain't no friars major, the phrase is from "little brothers" or fraticelli translated into Latin) and the second nuns (OSC, Ordo Sanctae Clarae or Poor Clares, from St Clare, a female follower of St Francis). She was praised by such notables as Erasmus, who called her a defender of the faith, and Thomas More, who said she was also a complete and total babe, or words to that effect.
After a long-distance relationship by mail, Arthur and Catalina finally met on 4 November 1501 and were married 14 November 1501 at St Paul's Cathedral in London. He didn't know Spanish and she didn't know English, and even when they tried the international language of the day, Latin, that didn't work due to differences in pronunciation! Then they both get sicker than hell, most likely from the deadly "sweating sickness" that swept England from 1485 to 1551 and hasn't come back since. She recovers, but he dies on 2 April 1502 and that blows the whole thing all to hell.
IV. I'm Henery The Eighth I Am.
It gets worse. Now Henry VII has two more problems! One is, with Arthur dead after not even five months of marriage, he would have to pay back Catalina's dowry, but he needed the cash! What's a dowry? Serious stuff in those days. No it was not part of a woman being bought and sold like a commodity. Quite the opposite, a dowry was meant to insure her well being and provide an incentive against mistreatment of her. It provided money toward the establishment and maintenance of the new household, and, there being no "life insurance" at the time, provided for their support should he die, since the dowry remained hers, not his. A woman without a dowry might have a problem getting a husband, and you know what, that is what the original Santa Claus, St Nicholas, was all about tossing money into stockings -- to provide poor girls a dowry that their fathers could not, so they would find husbands and not end up prostitutes or in the slave trade; it wasn't just something for fun to open on 25 December!
Plus there's the legitimacy that Catalina's descent brought, but, when her mother died, Castilla (Castile) passed to her older sister, Juana la Loca (Johanna the Mad) so that diminished somewhat Catalina's desired cred since she was now just a king's daughter. Nonetheless it was decided that she would marry the new heir, Arthur's younger brother Henry, five years younger than she, though Henry VII had second thoughts. The marriage was put off, officially to allow young Henry to grow up a bit, hell he was only 10 at the time, but really because it solved the giving back the dowry problem. Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and Henry VIII and Catalina were married 11 June 1509.
But more problems. In Roman Catholic canon law (church law) a man cannot marry his brother's widow. For you canon law freaks, and others uncomfortable with my sometimes offhand style of discourse, this is called the impediment of affinity. But given sufficient power and money, and church laws being church laws but not divine laws, one can get what one wants; like Sister Sarah said in Two Mules For Sister Sarah, by Clint Eastwood, the pre-eminent theologian of our time, "The church has dispensations". The Pope at the time was Julius II, who gave himself some unofficial dispensations, shall we say, having illegitimate children, one who survived being Felice, after whose birth he married her mother (Lucrezia) off to the majordomo of his cousin's (a Cardinal) household. All quite openly, hell, she's in a painting by Raphael. Well, like Sister Sarah said...
Henry VII got the dispensation from Julius II, mostly because Catalina's mom La Reina Isabela was also leaning on Pope Julius to give it. In support of the case for it, Catalina said she and Arthur never bopped (oh sorry, said that the marriage was never consummated). Actually Henry, being at this point a widower, could have married her himself, and did give some thought to marrying somebody and having more male heirs.
Now whyzat, what's wrong with the younger Henry? The thing is, Henry-soon-to-be-VIII was not brought up to be king, Arthur was, and Henry was educated for a church career, to probably end up Archbishop of Canterbury -- you didn't think being a bishop in state churches from the old Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox in the East, had a damn thing to do with being an overseer (translated bishop) in the Christian church, or was anything more than a state office, I hope.
So Catalina and Henry, now 17 and she 23, were married 11 June 1509, and on 24 June 1509 (Midsummer's Day, btw) were crowned king and queen (queen consort actually, meaning a queen who is queen by being married to the king but the king is the ruler) of England in Westminster Abbey. King Henry VIII.
V. How the Catalina Thing Played Out.
Catalina proved an exceptional queen. Even before her marriage, she had been the Spanish ambassador to England, the first woman in Europe ever to hold an ambassadorship. In 1513 Henry made her regent (ruling in his absence) when he went to France on a military campaign, and Catalina went downrange herself, leading the army though pregnant against the invading Scots (holy crap, over a millennium before, the Brythons asked us to move in and help them with the Picts, and they're still invading, persistent bleeders!) and won. She also commissioned a book, The Education of Christian Women, it being a novel idea at the time that women, Christian or otherwise, be educated. And she was conversant with the great scholars Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Even Cromwell, who hated her, said if she weren't a woman she could have gone up against any of the great heroes of history.
But that wasn't good enough. Catalina was pregnant six times: a stillborn daughter in 1510; a son, even named Henry, who died in 1511 after 52 days; another son who died at birth in 1513; yet another stillborn son in 1514; then in 1516 a healthy baby but who was a girl (this would be Queen Mary, oh hell ya); and in 1518 another girl who died though. Looked like she couldn't even give birth to the wrong sex right.
Henry began to think his marriage was cursed because it had been wrong in the first place. Leaning on Leviticus 20:21 he began to think the prohibition in the Law against a man marrying his brother's wife, with the consequence that they be childless, was the basis of what was happening, and therefore old Julius II even though pope could not legitimately grant a dispensation. So he took the case to the then current pope, Clement VII.
Well, there's some problems with that. For one thing, Catalina always maintained her marriage to Arthur was not consummated. She rejected appeals to quietly become a nun. To top it all off, the pope, Clement VII, following the Sack of Rome, the one in 1527, was the prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, yes, the same one to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, but who also doubled, as Carlos I, as king of Spain, and was Catalina's nephew. So there was some doubt he would side with Henry against Aunt Cathy, shall we say, or allow the pope to do so.
Not to mention, though I am about to, that about 1521 Henry started bopping Mary Boleyn, one of Catalina's maids of honour and otherwise Mrs William Carey. No, not Anne, Mary. Right along with all the Biblical high principles and stuff. Hey, used to be only kings and royalty and bishops got to do this kind of stuff and get away with it, now we all do, so no finger-pointing!
In 1535 Barnes (remember him, this post is actually about him!) was sent back to Germany in hopes he could get his Lutheran friends to side with Henry about the annulment. Didn't work. Emperor Charles sided with Aunt Cathy, and so for that matter did Luther himself. So did such otherwise different men as More and Tyndale. Hell, even Henry's sister Mary Tudor sided with the queen! So Henry turned to him whom he had earlier avoided, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, for the appeal.
Old Tom, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor to the king and created cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515, worked like hell to get the annulment. He argued that the pope could not overrule the Bible, assuming of course Henry's case fit the Bible's scenario, back to the whole consummated thing. He argued the wording of the dispensation was faulty, but, guess what, a properly worded version turned up in, guess where, Spain! Finally he argued that the decision, he being papal legate in England and all, should be made in England, and of course he knew which side he would take. The pope took that one, in 1528, but said he would send a second legate too from Rome, who took his sweet time getting there and getting things going.
Wait, there's more! Remember Mary Boleyn? She was at the royal court and began an affair with Henry about 1521 and it lasted about 5 years. She was already good at affairs, having had several in France including one with the King of France, Francis. Somewhere along the line her sister, less attractive but more ambitious and intelligent, Anne, caught the king's eye, but Anne was not about to be any old mistress like her sister had been, she held out for the whole pie, queen. Which made getting the annulment all the more imperative. Man, would to-day's diocesan RC marriage tribunals been handy then!
Well after all the delays the pope decides Henry may not marry until the Great Matter, as it was called, was settled in Rome, not England. Wolsey took the fall for that decision, Anne getting him ousted from government office in 1529. But old Tom fought back, and tried secret arrangements with Catalina and the pope to have Anne forced into exile from England. But he was found out and, though he remained Archbishop of York, was arrested for treason and would have been executed except he got sick and died in 1530 on his way to London to face trial.
Wolsey was replaced as Lord Chancellor by Sir Thomas More, Catalina gets banned from the court and her rooms given to Anne, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, William Warham, died, in the finest tradition of apostolic succession, Anne had the Boleyn family priest Thomas Cranmer, made the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The pope wasn't too keen on this, but after the King of France leaned on him a bit -- more apostolic succession -- he relented and gave the pallium, a sign of a bishop's special affinity with the pope, to Cranmer.
VI. Next?
It all went downhill pretty fast after that. Cromwell gets the Law of Supremacy, which recognised the final authority of the king over the church in England, passed in Parliament, More resigns over it, Henry and Anne wed secretly, Henry meets with the King of France to get his support for the marriage, Anne gets pregnant, the couple is publicly married 25 January 1533, on 23 May 1533 Cranmer in church court rules the marriage between Henry and Catalina was no marriage at all because it was invalid (that's what annulment is, not divorce, a recognition that no marriage in the sacramental sense ever took place because the marriage rite was done under invalid conditions, hence null, hence the term annulment) and on 28 May rules Henry and Anne are validly therefore truly married, on 1 June Anne is crowned Queen of England and on 7 September Queen Anne gives birth! To a daughter, oh MAJOR oops!
Nonetheless Parliament enacts the Act of Succession of 1533 (hell of a year, that) recognising Anne's, not Catalina's, children as legitimate and heirs, and in a sign of things to come, repudiates any appeal to any foreign authority of any kind (guess who that means) and high treason punishable by death to publish any such things. Yeah, my kingdom is not of this world indeed!
Judas, Parliament even made it a matter of praemunire facias -- holy crap what's that? Well, it's bogus mediaeval Latin for a bogus mediaeval English idea that it is treason to appeal to any authority beyond the king re the church in England, from which acts the sheriff does (that's facias) a warning (that's praemunire). Praemunire actually means to fortify, but the word was mistaken for the correct Latin for warning which is praemonere, the ancestor of the word premonition. Bad Latin for a bad idea.
Henry warn't no Lutheran. In 1521 Henry VIII published Assertio septem sacramentorum, A Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which he had shown to Wolsey and then expanded as an attack on Luther's De captivitate babylonica of 1520, a key influence on me, and dedicated it to Pope Leo X, who in turn named Henry Fidei defensor, Defender of the Faith, on 17 October 1521. But after Henry decided he was head of the church in England in 1530, Pope Paul III revoked the title and Henry was excommunicated, but the English Parliament restored it, and the English monarch to this day remains Supreme Governor of the Church of England, formally above the "Archbishop" of Canterbury.
Prince Charles said in 1994 he wants the title changed to Defender of Faith, not the Faith. Well, rock on Church of England/Anglican Communion.
Hell, Pope Clement blew a gasket at that, excommunicated Henry and Cranmer, said Cranmer's annulment decision was itself null and broke off relations with England. Anne miscarries in 1534 and by year's end Henry is trying with Cranmer and Cromwell to figure a way to dump Anne without having to go back to Catalina. Then what the hell but Catalina dies, Henry and Anne rejoice, since death breaks the bond of marriage, Anne's pregnant, and -- MAJOR MAJOR oops, miscarries with a baby boy on, guess what, 29 January 1536 the very day of Catalina's funeral. I ain't making this up and didn't read it in a Dan Brown novel either. Who needs that when the truth is way weirder!
VII. And Next?
Well hell Henry is bopping a lady in waiting at court named Jane Seymour (no, not the actress) anyway, and hell yes, death ends any claim of marriage, so whadya know but charges of infidelity and treason are brought against Anne, she's arrested along with five guys, including her brother, accused of schtupping her, they are executed and five days later, 19 May 1536, so is Queen Anne. The next day, Henry and Jane are engaged, and ten days after that, are married. Wow. Another Act of Succession says now Jane's kids are first in line for the throne. Jane gets pregnant and gives birth to, guess what, a baby boy (who will be Edward VI)! Problem solved!
Well no. She also gets an infection in childbirth and dies on 24 October 1537. Henry gets his long desired son but loses his queen, whom he always afterward thought of as his true wife and next to whom he is now buried in Windsor Castle.
Now it would be easy to put this all down to attitudes towards women, but that would be to read it as if it were happening now. Yes, that was part of it, but only part. We saw above, at least I hope we did, I went on about it enough, that civil war and legitimate occupancy of the throne had kept England in a state of civil war at home and in problems abroad for years and years, and we saw that Henry had that much on his mind, and also that he not leave such a situation behind when he died. Having an unquestioned heir and ruler, at home and abroad, was a really big deal. Henry had exactly the same problems his dad did, just with different details.
Of course they were centuries from knowing it is the father who determines the sex of the child!
VIII. Number Four and The End For Barnes.
Well a guy's gotta move on, right? So Cromwell starts thinking this Anne of Cleves would be a hell of a good idea as his next wife, even gets a guy to go paint a portrait of her to convince Henry. Why her? Well, Anne of Cleves is really Anna von Juelich-Kleve-Berg. That's near Düsseldorf. Wherezat? It's the dorf -- village -- near the delta of the river Düssel for crying out loud, a tributary of the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine. Anna was the daughter of the Duke there, John II, and was promised at age 12 to be the wife of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, but Cromwell thought she'd make this hell of a wife for Henry since Protestant German allies would help if the Catholics invaded England, so Barnes, with his German connexion, was involved in helping with that, and it happened.
Henry was not all that into the idea, hoped Cromwell could find a way out, but there was too much at stake in alliances with the Germans for that, so they were married 6 January 1540 by bleeding Cranmer himself, but there was no consummation of the marriage and by Summer Henry wanted out. The Duke had ticked off the Holy Roman Emperor and Henry did not want to get into that either. So Barnes was asked to help in the annulment of Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, and an annulment was granted on the basis of the contract with Francis and there having been no consummation, which, in more contemporary language, means no sex. Anna went along with it all and fared pretty well in contrast to Henry's other wives, and for going along with annulment she lived out her life relatively well, not to mention in the former home of the Boleyns, Hever Castle, which was given to her.
But those involved with setting the marriage up didn't fare so well. Henry already had refused to accept Lutheran theology, the Six Articles of 1539 effectively renounced Lutheranism and affirmed Roman practices considered abuses by Lutherans. The Six Articles affirmed 1) transubstantiation, 2) communion in host only, 3) clerical celibacy, 4) vows of chastity, 5) private masses, 6) auricular confession, private confession of sins to a priest.
Then the annulment in 1540 also worked against Barnes. He preached against Bishop Stephen Gardiner (another Suffolk boy), active in the enforcement of Catholic doctrine, in the Spring, was forced to recant, then recanted his recant and professed the Lutheran faith, for which he and two others were burnt alive for heresy under the Six Articles, along with three others for treason for denying royal supremacy over the church, on 30 July, 1540.
In Germany, Lutherans and Catholics alike were shocked and outraged. Luther took Barnes' final confession of faith, translated or had it translated into German, wrote a preface to it himself, and published it later that year (1540) as Bekenntnis des Glaubens.
IX. What Happened To The Other Guys and Everyone Else.
Cromwell was executed 28 July 1540, two days before Barnes, by beheading in the Tower of London. Thomas Cranmer, who would become the first non-Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who believed in the right of the king to determine the faith of the nation and all its people, which makes it hard when you go back and forth between Catholic and "Anglican" monarchs, recanted his recantation of his recantation, whatever, and was burnt at the stake 21 March 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary.
Remember Mary, that's Catalina's daughter! Wanna know the kicker? After all this long story coming from an enormously complicated matter of the legitimacy of and succession to the Tudor line of kings of England, Henry ruled for just short of 38 years and left only three heirs of either sex, and within about ten years of his death on 28 January 1547 all three of them came to the throne -- Anne Boleyn's daughter becoming Elizabeth I and as we saw Jane Seymour's son becoming Edward VI -- and not a one of them left an heir! Not a one! Elizabeth I was the last Tudor on the throne. And she never even married! All that for nothing.
Through secret negotiations Elizabeth arranged for the House of Stuart (or Stewart) to take over a combined England and their original Scotland. Man, the Scots again. And we (Angles) were asked to come there and keep them out way back when. Now they're gonna be the royal line of the whole damn place! Well, not really, the Stuarts aren't real Scots, they're Normans from Brittany in France who arrived in Scotland after the Norman Conquest of England. The last Stuart was Queen Anne, who died 1 May 1707, and the English again turned to the Germans to solve things, with the House of Hanover taking over and lasting until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
Victoria's son, by patrilineal (from the father) descent, which rules in such things, Edward VII, is of the house of his father, Prince Albert, the house of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, Englished to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but which adopted the much more English sounding name Windsor during World War I, German descended monarchs on a throne in a war against Germany being too weird. His cousin, who was on the German throne, Kaiser Wilhelm II, thought that was a riot and said he looked forward to seeing Shakespeare's new play The Merry Wives of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.
The current English royal family is the House of Windsor. There's still Hanovers though, the current head of that bunch being Ernst August V Prinz von Hannover (I ain't translating, it's not hard to work out) who is also the current, that being the third, husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco, so maybe he'll end up with a throne or something. I mean, his titles are not recognised in modern England or Germany, but they are in Monaco! Caroline got an annulment (yeah annulment again, it's a Catholic line) of her first marriage, and her second husband died in an accident, but the Prince on marrying her married a Catholic and so, under the Act of Settlement of 1701 which allows neither Catholics nor spouses of Catholics on the throne, boofed himself out of the line of succession for the British throne, which at 385th in line at the time was a bit of a long shot anyway.
The heir to the English throne, Charles, is through his father of the House of Gluecksburg, short for the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg (Schleswig-Holstein, current name of where we Angles came from!) in turn a branch of the biggest baddest ones of the all the House of Oldenburg, who have been or are on the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia (yeah the Romanovs), Greece and looks like the British Commonwealth one of these days.
After Charles will come the absolutely delightful William and Catherine, currently the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, dear old Cambridge. Their first child, Prince George, is now third in line.
X. What We Can Learn From This Now.
Notice something? Ain't no reformation going on here, just getting the church to baptise, as it were, matters of state, the church and the state being all part of one thing. From the Assertio of 1521 to the Six Articles of 1539, it's Catholic as all hell, just with a little jurisdictional modification so the king can get an annulment when he needs one.
One of the most enduring enticements of the descendants from the state church of the Roman Empire -- in the West, the RCC and those non-Catholic national churches, generally Anglican or Lutheran, which consider themselves to have taken over Rome's function within their jurisdictions, and in the East the Orthodox churches -- is the apparent solidity of their continuous existence, presumably then with a connexion to the catholic church of the creeds, the Apostles, and Christ himself.
For a person of a faith not solidly grounded in Christ and the Gospel, and often troubled by tumult in their churches, this enticement is so strong as to solve or resolve all doubt. It produces many converts for this reason. For a famous example, the ridiculous John Henry Newman, to the point that his deus-ex-ecclesia, shall we say, solution to his indecision led him to declare that really there are only two real possibilities, atheism or Catholicism, and that those not in either camp are either on their way "home to Rome" or have not thought through the implications of not going to Rome.
While faith in Christ can exist in such an environment, what an unnecessary, distracting and complicating encumbrance to it.
Our foray about into the situation in which Robert Barnes lived and by which was ultimately killed is but one of any number of such situations which show this apparent solidity and continuity is but the most appalling and grotesque of shams, rooted in NOTHING WHATEVER of Christ, his Word or his Sacrament, all of that being a self-justifying veneer over which affairs of state played out. Miserable blasphemous parodies of the catholic church which have survived the passing of the states as then constituted which created them.
We needed Barnes then, and we need him now. Happily we no longer live under the idea that rulers are agents of God with the right to choose the religion of their people. Barnes himself struggled to find his way between the political reality of this idea in his time and spreading the Gospel in reforming Christ's church. In England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, with which the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod is in fellowship in the International Lutheran Council, is the heir of Barnes' work in England.
Yet, in this freedom now, Christianity, the church in general, and our beloved synod in particular veer between the same two poles of those times, namely, on the one hand the attractive exterior in which the errors of Rome and the Orthodox are couched, and on the other, the different but no less attractive exterior in which the errors of Calvinism and the Reformed are couched, most recently in American "evangelicalism".
Our beloved synod is greatly beset by this. May the works and example of Robert Barnes help and strengthen us as they did Luther in our Bekenntnis des Glaubens, our confession of faith, holding to the Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, and steering our course so as not to crash on the rocks under the influence of either of these siren songs, which unlike those of Greek mythology, are quite real.
From the last words of Robert Barnes, DD, martyr, on 30 July 1540:
Lord if Thou straightly mark our iniquity, who is able to abide Thy judgement? Wherefore I trust in no work that I ever did, but only in the death of Jesus Christ. I do not doubt, but through Him to inherit the kingdom of heaven.
(Quoted from "The Reformation Essays of Dr Robert Barnes", Neelak S Tjernagel editor. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1963. Republished 19 October 2007.)
30 July 2014
15 July 2014
A Different St Nicholas - and Alexandra. 17 July 2014.
17 July 2014 is the 96th anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, with his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, who began life as Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a Lutheran, and their children in 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Russia. They are now saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. And there's Lutherans in Russia, then and now. Here's the story.
The Chilling Legacy of These Murders.
The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. While we hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of Nazi Germany. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the total number of Nazi victims, and even less yet about the great number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.
By the most conservative estimates, that number would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10 million. That is roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims, and nearly twice the number of the specifically targeted group. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what Nazi Germany managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.
The Soviet Union itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and the three of their children then found were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. Why there? The city was founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint St Peter. It was the capitol of Russia until the Communist revolution, known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, and its name was restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.
At the burial, the then-president of post Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981, and on 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints, of a type called Passion Bearers. These are people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and the manner of his death. On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood", built on the site of the house where the royal family was murdered.
The regime which killed them has passed into history, but, there is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.
About 70% of Russians count themselves Orthodox Christians, though few regularly participate in church. Of Orthodox churches, 95% are Russian Orthodox, the traditional Russian religion overall. There are Lutherans in Russia, in large part due to the open immigration policies of Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran princess to end up Empress of Russia.
How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia. The Second Time.
Alexandra was born 6 June 1872 in Darmstadt in Das Großherzogtum Hessen und bei Rhein. Don't freak, I'll translate, it's The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine. OK but where izzat? In west central modern Germany, that's where. Its biggest and probably best known city is Frankfurt, on more correctly Frankfurt am Main (that's pronounced like "mine" in English) which means Frankfurt on the Main. OK but what is the Main? It's a river, a major tributary of the Rhine (Rhein). Darmstadt was the seat of the grand dukes of the Grand Duchy, which is why Alexandra, as the daughter of the then-current ruling one, was born there; the modern capital of the state of Hesse is Wiesbaden.
Anyway, the baby girl was given her mother's name. So her mom's name was Alix? Well actually it was Alice, as in Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, a daughter of Queen Victoria. That's right, Queen Victoria was Alix' grandma. This we'll shortly see influenced both the beginning of her life and the end of it. Her childhood nickname was Alicky, which would become a favourite term of endearment with her husband Nicholas too. Alice was a remarkable woman, a huge fan of Florence Nightingale and worked to involve women in health care. Ironically she died pretty young, at age 35 in 1878 in Darmstadt, of diphtheria which was overtaking the whole ducal house.
Alix died relatively young too, at 46, but her career as a noblewoman was not to be like her mother's. Alice was much loved in both her native and her married lands -- hell, they lovingly put a Union Jack over her coffin at her funeral in Darmstadt -- but Alix was never accepted as really Russian by nearly everyone from peasants to royalty alike. The whole Russian thing with this German Lutheran princess, which would alter all subsequent history, started with her attraction to the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas, and his to her.
So how would they even meet, you know, German, Russian? You gotta understand that European nobility and royalty are mishpocha (don't freak, that's Yiddish for "extended family"). Nicholas and Alexandra are second cousins, and also third cousins, depending on which ancestral line you go through. They met in 1884 and it was mutual from the start, and when they met again in 1889 there was no denying it. Neither family wanted the match. Grandma (Queen Vic) wanted someone else for Alix, and Nicholas' dad Tsar Alexander III, was dead set against any German or Lutheran marrying into the royal family. But Alix stood up to Grandma, who actually kind of liked it that she did, and as Alexander's health declined he eventually gave in.
They got engaged in Germany (Coburg, to be exact) in April 1894 and Alexander died on 1 November 1894. The Russians first saw their new empress-to-be (he became emperor on his father's death, she would become empress consort on marriage to him) as she came to St Petersburg with the family for the funeral. "She comes behind a coffin" was heard everywhere. Things were off to a bad start. She and Nicholas were married right after, on 26 November 1894. Alix at first was not too sure about having to become Russian Orthodox, but she eventually became an enthusiastic convert, and got a new name in the process, Alexandra Feodorovna. Then things went right straight to hell.
During the coronation ceremonies a riot broke out when it seemed there wouldn't be enough of the food provided for the public to go around, and several thousand were killed in the stampede. The French had a gala ball scheduled in honour of the coronation. Nicholas and Alexandra were reluctant to attend given what had happened, but they were persuaded by court advisers to go through with it so as not to offend the French. Which ended up offending their own people, who took it as a sign that their royalty cared nothing about what happened to them. Then there's the matter of producing an heir. Alexandra was having daughters, and under court protocol of the time the heir must be male. Then when she finally had a son, he was born with haemophilia, a deadly disease for which there was no treatment at the time.
And, haemophilia was known to be passed on in, guess what, Grandma's (that's Queen Vic) line, so she was further thought a disaster for having brought the "English disease" as some called it to the Russian line. Neither all her works of prayer and devotion, nor any available medical treatment, helped, and Alexandra became pretty much a recluse making sure her son had no injury. In time she turned to this itinerant Russian Orthodox "holy man" and healer, Rasputin, and guess what, her son got better, and Rasputin gained influence at the court.
Rasputin was a supposed mystic, a type of religious lunacy. Yes, her son got better, but as usual a little science clears up all the "mystical" bullroar. The doctors attending her son were using a new drug widely thought at the time to be a new wonder drug. Aspirin. Yeah, aspirin. It actually is a pretty good mild analgesic (pain reliever) but it also, and this was not known at the time, is an anti-coagulant. Now, retarding the coagulation of the blood is exactly what you don't want to do in treating a haemophiliac! So of course when she turned away from medical treatment and followed Rasputin's advice her son got better -- she quit giving him an anti-coagulant, nothing mystical or spiritual about it.
Rasputin's advice unfortunately began to extend to other matters too, and he supposedly had a revelation that Nicholas should go to the front -- the Great War, the War To End All Wars, which it didn't and is now just the first of "world wars" -- and personally take command of the military. This left Alexandra to run the internal affairs of state, for which she was completely unsuited by both training and temperament. So, all sorts of incompetent officials further made a mess of things. Between the shortages due to the war effort and the Russian Winter everyone was miserable and many thought Alexandra was actually sabotaging things, being German and all.
Riots ensued, and the soldiers who were supposed to put down the rebellion joined it, and the next day, 13 March 1917, they established a provisional government called the Petrograd Soviet. No, not communists or the Soviet Union. Petrograd because this happened in St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and soviet because that's the word for council in Russian. This is known as the February Revolution. Huh, you just said it was in March! Yeah, in our calendar now but in what is now called the Old Style calendar used there and then, it was February. The Tsar was told he must abdicate, and he did, first being kept with his family in the palace, then, for their safety the provisional government sent them to Siberia.
Things changed. The provisional government was itself overthrown by the communists called Bolshevik (the word means "majority") under Vladimir Lenin on 7 November 1917 in the October Revolution (same deal about the calendars, it was 26 October in the Old Style calendar). Their promises of "peace, land and bread" attracted many. Alexander Kerensky, the major figure in the provisional government, was exiled and ended up living out his life in New York City. The royal family did not fare so well, and at 0215 on 17 July, Bolsheviks, having disarmed their guard, shot the entire royal family to death, then smashed the rib cages of the tsar and tsarina with bayonets, stripped the bodies, burned the clothes, and threw the bodies in a mine shaft 12 miles away, then the bodies were pulled out, their faces smashed, dismembered, burned with sulphuric acid, and reburied. There they remained until after the fall of the Soviet Union decades later.
(A personal aside -- my French teacher as a kid in the 1950s was an old Russian woman who was a young woman in a family at court through all of this. They were among the exiles, and French being the language of the court, she earned a living as a translator in embassies and ended up in an apartment in her daughter's home. French lessons came with tea and all the decorum of her youth.)
How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia. The First Time.
Now there's a story too. Tsarina Alexandra wasn't the first German Lutheran noblewoman to end up Tsarina. Catherine the Great was originally the noble-born raised-Lutheran Sophie Friederike Auguste, nicknamed Figchen, or Little Frederica. Her father was the devout Lutheran Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who as a Prussian general was governor of Stettin, Pomerania, then part of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, but her birth city (Stettin) is in a part of Pomerania that in now part of Poland (and called Szczecin).
Huh? How does Figchen end up Empress of Russia? Because her mother, Johanna, loved court intrigue and wanted it for her daughter, but she really ticked off Tsarina Elisabeth who threw her out of the country for spying for Prussia. The Big E liked Figchen though, and apparently liked the family, hell, she was going to marry Johanna's brother Karl but he died from smallpox before it could happen. Figchen ended up married to E's nephew and heir, Peter III, who was also Figchen's second cousin. But first she learned Russian, and on 28 June 1744 she converted to the Russian Orthodox Church -- against her father's orders, who went ballistic over it -- and was given the name Catherine. Then she marries Peter on 21 August 1745, and after Elisabeth died on 5 January 1762, Peter takes the throne.
He didn't last long. He pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War -- remember that, left Mother England in huge debt, to pay for which they taxed the hell out of the American colonies who ended up revolting and becoming the United States -- got friendly with Prussia, admired the Western Europeans, tried to make the Russian Orthodox Church more Lutheran, and had a mistress for whom Catherine was afraid he would divorce her. So he pissed off everybody, and when he went to his paternal ancestral Schleswig-Holstein (the area from which my ancestors the Angles left for Mother England, but hey), Catherine with her lover (fair is fair I guess) staged a military coup and Peter was arrested 14 July 1762. He wasn't too upset really, he just asked for an estate and his mistress, also named Elisabeth.
But three days later he was killed by one of the conspirators while in custody, though Figchen/Catherine does not seem to have been behind that part of things. So after Peter being Tsar for six months, his wife succeeds him. Some say she should have been Regent until her son, Paul, was old enough to become Tsar, but what the hell, the first Tsarina Catherine (Catherine the Great is technically Catherine II) succeeded her husband Peter I (aka the Great) in 1725, and anyway Catherine no longer Figchen ruled until she died, which was 17 November 1796, at which time George Washington was in his second term as President of the United States. Got all that? No wonder George didn't want anything resembling royalty here.
Why Eating Runzas Is a Spiritual and World-Historical Experience.
And a damn good eating experience too.
In 1762, the year she came to power, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting non-Jewish Europeans to settle in Russia and farm using more modern European methods. It got few results, French and English preferred to emigrate to America, and another manifesto with more benefits was issued in 1763, attracting Germans since they were allowed to maintain their language, religions and culture, and were exempt from military service. This last was particularly attractive to Mennonites, but many German Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed also came, settling along the Volga River, hence the name Volga Germans, or Wolgadeutsche.
However these benefits, particularly the exemption from military service, were eroded and many Wolgadeutsche, especially the pacifist Mennonites, left for the midwestern United States, Canada, and South American places of German emigration. The midwestern US immigrants have given us people as different as US Senator Tom Daschle and and big-band leader Lawrence Welk. But most importantly, it has given us the Runza, a magnificent pocket sandwich of beef, onion and cabbage -- thank you Catherine!!
In 1949 Alex Brening and his sister Sally Everett opened a drive-in in Lincoln NE offering food of Wolgadeutsche derivation, which has since expanded to a regional chain, including one close to Concordia-Seward (NE) as every grad of there knows. Besides the fantastic runza (get the cheese runza, Combo #1) they have the best burgers, fries and OR in the whole "fast food" industry. Hell yes. You can have a great meal, be a part of history back to Catherine the Great, proclaim your solidarity with ethnic self-determination and praise God for religious freedom as a Lutheran (or anything else) all at the same time! Makes me wanna go to the one a few blocks from me right now!
Lutherans In Russia Now.
Anyway, in this heavily Russian Orthodox land with notable German-born raised-Lutheran Tsarinas, there are Lutherans. Not a lot, but even so, not all in the same group (just like here). There is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia, which is a member of the International Lutheran Council (founded 1993), as are we ("we" being LCMS). There's the Evangelical Lutheran Church - "Concord", a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (founded 1996), whose American members are WELS and ELS. And there's the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and Other States, a member of the thoroughly heterodox Lutheran-in-name-only Lutheran World Federation (founded 1947),whose American member is the similarly characterised ELCA, and to which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia also belongs.
Also there's the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church. It began with a Siberian named Vsevolod Lytkin, who converted from Soviet era atheism to Lutheranism in Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union, at age 20 in 1987. In 1991 as the Soviet Union was passing into history Estonia became independent and Lytkin began missionary work back in Siberian, with support from our beloved synod (that's LCMS). In 2003 the result of his efforts, the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church, became independent of the more liberal WLF-affiliated Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. Pastor Lytkin now serves as the bishop of the SELC. While it is not affiliated with larger Lutheran bodies, in 2010 full recognition and fellowship was established between the SELC and LCMS.
I am pleased to say that the pastor of St Gertrude's Lutheran Parish in Yekaterinburg -- the city in which the Tsar and family were murdered in the Ipatiev House, on whose site the "Church on the Blood", whose full name is Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, now stands as mentioned above -- is a "friend" of Past Elder on Facebook. Seeing another "Catherine" in the city's name? It's there, named at its founding 18 November 1723 after St Catherine, name saint of Catherine I (Yekaterina), Tsarina and wife of then ruling Tsar Peter I the Great, who died 8 February 1725, after which she became ruler like the next Peter and Catherine duo (III and II/the Great). St Gertrude's has been there since Day One too. Check out their site here and please consider giving them a hand in their wonderful work.
Kind of all comes full circle, huh? That's what's cool about history. It makes the circle clearer, sometimes even gives one a clue there is a circle, an interrelation, at all, amid all this stuff of life that otherwise seems like so much dust from the past. And it makes where we are now clearer, which is why I get into all this stuff.
2014 is the 100th year since the start of the world war whose aftermath saw the end of the Russian Empire and rise of the Soviet Union (not to mention the end of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire). It is also the year in which the Crimea, which Catherine the Great had won back from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, was restored to Russia itself 60 years after the Soviet Union under Khrushchev made it part of the Ukraine in 1954.
You wonder what a different world would be now had Alicky listened to Grandma or Nicholas listened to dad. Or, if Alicky had decided confessing Lutheran faith was more important than literally anything else.
Nicholas' and Alexandra's feast day, following the church's longstanding custom, is 17 July.
The Chilling Legacy of These Murders.
The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. While we hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of Nazi Germany. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the total number of Nazi victims, and even less yet about the great number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.
By the most conservative estimates, that number would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10 million. That is roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims, and nearly twice the number of the specifically targeted group. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what Nazi Germany managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.
The Soviet Union itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and the three of their children then found were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. Why there? The city was founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint St Peter. It was the capitol of Russia until the Communist revolution, known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, and its name was restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.
At the burial, the then-president of post Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981, and on 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints, of a type called Passion Bearers. These are people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and the manner of his death. On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood", built on the site of the house where the royal family was murdered.
The regime which killed them has passed into history, but, there is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.
About 70% of Russians count themselves Orthodox Christians, though few regularly participate in church. Of Orthodox churches, 95% are Russian Orthodox, the traditional Russian religion overall. There are Lutherans in Russia, in large part due to the open immigration policies of Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran princess to end up Empress of Russia.
How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia. The Second Time.
Alexandra was born 6 June 1872 in Darmstadt in Das Großherzogtum Hessen und bei Rhein. Don't freak, I'll translate, it's The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine. OK but where izzat? In west central modern Germany, that's where. Its biggest and probably best known city is Frankfurt, on more correctly Frankfurt am Main (that's pronounced like "mine" in English) which means Frankfurt on the Main. OK but what is the Main? It's a river, a major tributary of the Rhine (Rhein). Darmstadt was the seat of the grand dukes of the Grand Duchy, which is why Alexandra, as the daughter of the then-current ruling one, was born there; the modern capital of the state of Hesse is Wiesbaden.
Anyway, the baby girl was given her mother's name. So her mom's name was Alix? Well actually it was Alice, as in Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, a daughter of Queen Victoria. That's right, Queen Victoria was Alix' grandma. This we'll shortly see influenced both the beginning of her life and the end of it. Her childhood nickname was Alicky, which would become a favourite term of endearment with her husband Nicholas too. Alice was a remarkable woman, a huge fan of Florence Nightingale and worked to involve women in health care. Ironically she died pretty young, at age 35 in 1878 in Darmstadt, of diphtheria which was overtaking the whole ducal house.
Alix died relatively young too, at 46, but her career as a noblewoman was not to be like her mother's. Alice was much loved in both her native and her married lands -- hell, they lovingly put a Union Jack over her coffin at her funeral in Darmstadt -- but Alix was never accepted as really Russian by nearly everyone from peasants to royalty alike. The whole Russian thing with this German Lutheran princess, which would alter all subsequent history, started with her attraction to the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas, and his to her.
So how would they even meet, you know, German, Russian? You gotta understand that European nobility and royalty are mishpocha (don't freak, that's Yiddish for "extended family"). Nicholas and Alexandra are second cousins, and also third cousins, depending on which ancestral line you go through. They met in 1884 and it was mutual from the start, and when they met again in 1889 there was no denying it. Neither family wanted the match. Grandma (Queen Vic) wanted someone else for Alix, and Nicholas' dad Tsar Alexander III, was dead set against any German or Lutheran marrying into the royal family. But Alix stood up to Grandma, who actually kind of liked it that she did, and as Alexander's health declined he eventually gave in.
They got engaged in Germany (Coburg, to be exact) in April 1894 and Alexander died on 1 November 1894. The Russians first saw their new empress-to-be (he became emperor on his father's death, she would become empress consort on marriage to him) as she came to St Petersburg with the family for the funeral. "She comes behind a coffin" was heard everywhere. Things were off to a bad start. She and Nicholas were married right after, on 26 November 1894. Alix at first was not too sure about having to become Russian Orthodox, but she eventually became an enthusiastic convert, and got a new name in the process, Alexandra Feodorovna. Then things went right straight to hell.
During the coronation ceremonies a riot broke out when it seemed there wouldn't be enough of the food provided for the public to go around, and several thousand were killed in the stampede. The French had a gala ball scheduled in honour of the coronation. Nicholas and Alexandra were reluctant to attend given what had happened, but they were persuaded by court advisers to go through with it so as not to offend the French. Which ended up offending their own people, who took it as a sign that their royalty cared nothing about what happened to them. Then there's the matter of producing an heir. Alexandra was having daughters, and under court protocol of the time the heir must be male. Then when she finally had a son, he was born with haemophilia, a deadly disease for which there was no treatment at the time.
And, haemophilia was known to be passed on in, guess what, Grandma's (that's Queen Vic) line, so she was further thought a disaster for having brought the "English disease" as some called it to the Russian line. Neither all her works of prayer and devotion, nor any available medical treatment, helped, and Alexandra became pretty much a recluse making sure her son had no injury. In time she turned to this itinerant Russian Orthodox "holy man" and healer, Rasputin, and guess what, her son got better, and Rasputin gained influence at the court.
Rasputin was a supposed mystic, a type of religious lunacy. Yes, her son got better, but as usual a little science clears up all the "mystical" bullroar. The doctors attending her son were using a new drug widely thought at the time to be a new wonder drug. Aspirin. Yeah, aspirin. It actually is a pretty good mild analgesic (pain reliever) but it also, and this was not known at the time, is an anti-coagulant. Now, retarding the coagulation of the blood is exactly what you don't want to do in treating a haemophiliac! So of course when she turned away from medical treatment and followed Rasputin's advice her son got better -- she quit giving him an anti-coagulant, nothing mystical or spiritual about it.
Rasputin's advice unfortunately began to extend to other matters too, and he supposedly had a revelation that Nicholas should go to the front -- the Great War, the War To End All Wars, which it didn't and is now just the first of "world wars" -- and personally take command of the military. This left Alexandra to run the internal affairs of state, for which she was completely unsuited by both training and temperament. So, all sorts of incompetent officials further made a mess of things. Between the shortages due to the war effort and the Russian Winter everyone was miserable and many thought Alexandra was actually sabotaging things, being German and all.
Riots ensued, and the soldiers who were supposed to put down the rebellion joined it, and the next day, 13 March 1917, they established a provisional government called the Petrograd Soviet. No, not communists or the Soviet Union. Petrograd because this happened in St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and soviet because that's the word for council in Russian. This is known as the February Revolution. Huh, you just said it was in March! Yeah, in our calendar now but in what is now called the Old Style calendar used there and then, it was February. The Tsar was told he must abdicate, and he did, first being kept with his family in the palace, then, for their safety the provisional government sent them to Siberia.
Things changed. The provisional government was itself overthrown by the communists called Bolshevik (the word means "majority") under Vladimir Lenin on 7 November 1917 in the October Revolution (same deal about the calendars, it was 26 October in the Old Style calendar). Their promises of "peace, land and bread" attracted many. Alexander Kerensky, the major figure in the provisional government, was exiled and ended up living out his life in New York City. The royal family did not fare so well, and at 0215 on 17 July, Bolsheviks, having disarmed their guard, shot the entire royal family to death, then smashed the rib cages of the tsar and tsarina with bayonets, stripped the bodies, burned the clothes, and threw the bodies in a mine shaft 12 miles away, then the bodies were pulled out, their faces smashed, dismembered, burned with sulphuric acid, and reburied. There they remained until after the fall of the Soviet Union decades later.
(A personal aside -- my French teacher as a kid in the 1950s was an old Russian woman who was a young woman in a family at court through all of this. They were among the exiles, and French being the language of the court, she earned a living as a translator in embassies and ended up in an apartment in her daughter's home. French lessons came with tea and all the decorum of her youth.)
How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia. The First Time.
Now there's a story too. Tsarina Alexandra wasn't the first German Lutheran noblewoman to end up Tsarina. Catherine the Great was originally the noble-born raised-Lutheran Sophie Friederike Auguste, nicknamed Figchen, or Little Frederica. Her father was the devout Lutheran Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who as a Prussian general was governor of Stettin, Pomerania, then part of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, but her birth city (Stettin) is in a part of Pomerania that in now part of Poland (and called Szczecin).
Huh? How does Figchen end up Empress of Russia? Because her mother, Johanna, loved court intrigue and wanted it for her daughter, but she really ticked off Tsarina Elisabeth who threw her out of the country for spying for Prussia. The Big E liked Figchen though, and apparently liked the family, hell, she was going to marry Johanna's brother Karl but he died from smallpox before it could happen. Figchen ended up married to E's nephew and heir, Peter III, who was also Figchen's second cousin. But first she learned Russian, and on 28 June 1744 she converted to the Russian Orthodox Church -- against her father's orders, who went ballistic over it -- and was given the name Catherine. Then she marries Peter on 21 August 1745, and after Elisabeth died on 5 January 1762, Peter takes the throne.
He didn't last long. He pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War -- remember that, left Mother England in huge debt, to pay for which they taxed the hell out of the American colonies who ended up revolting and becoming the United States -- got friendly with Prussia, admired the Western Europeans, tried to make the Russian Orthodox Church more Lutheran, and had a mistress for whom Catherine was afraid he would divorce her. So he pissed off everybody, and when he went to his paternal ancestral Schleswig-Holstein (the area from which my ancestors the Angles left for Mother England, but hey), Catherine with her lover (fair is fair I guess) staged a military coup and Peter was arrested 14 July 1762. He wasn't too upset really, he just asked for an estate and his mistress, also named Elisabeth.
But three days later he was killed by one of the conspirators while in custody, though Figchen/Catherine does not seem to have been behind that part of things. So after Peter being Tsar for six months, his wife succeeds him. Some say she should have been Regent until her son, Paul, was old enough to become Tsar, but what the hell, the first Tsarina Catherine (Catherine the Great is technically Catherine II) succeeded her husband Peter I (aka the Great) in 1725, and anyway Catherine no longer Figchen ruled until she died, which was 17 November 1796, at which time George Washington was in his second term as President of the United States. Got all that? No wonder George didn't want anything resembling royalty here.
Why Eating Runzas Is a Spiritual and World-Historical Experience.
And a damn good eating experience too.
In 1762, the year she came to power, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting non-Jewish Europeans to settle in Russia and farm using more modern European methods. It got few results, French and English preferred to emigrate to America, and another manifesto with more benefits was issued in 1763, attracting Germans since they were allowed to maintain their language, religions and culture, and were exempt from military service. This last was particularly attractive to Mennonites, but many German Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed also came, settling along the Volga River, hence the name Volga Germans, or Wolgadeutsche.
However these benefits, particularly the exemption from military service, were eroded and many Wolgadeutsche, especially the pacifist Mennonites, left for the midwestern United States, Canada, and South American places of German emigration. The midwestern US immigrants have given us people as different as US Senator Tom Daschle and and big-band leader Lawrence Welk. But most importantly, it has given us the Runza, a magnificent pocket sandwich of beef, onion and cabbage -- thank you Catherine!!
In 1949 Alex Brening and his sister Sally Everett opened a drive-in in Lincoln NE offering food of Wolgadeutsche derivation, which has since expanded to a regional chain, including one close to Concordia-Seward (NE) as every grad of there knows. Besides the fantastic runza (get the cheese runza, Combo #1) they have the best burgers, fries and OR in the whole "fast food" industry. Hell yes. You can have a great meal, be a part of history back to Catherine the Great, proclaim your solidarity with ethnic self-determination and praise God for religious freedom as a Lutheran (or anything else) all at the same time! Makes me wanna go to the one a few blocks from me right now!
Lutherans In Russia Now.
Anyway, in this heavily Russian Orthodox land with notable German-born raised-Lutheran Tsarinas, there are Lutherans. Not a lot, but even so, not all in the same group (just like here). There is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia, which is a member of the International Lutheran Council (founded 1993), as are we ("we" being LCMS). There's the Evangelical Lutheran Church - "Concord", a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (founded 1996), whose American members are WELS and ELS. And there's the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and Other States, a member of the thoroughly heterodox Lutheran-in-name-only Lutheran World Federation (founded 1947),whose American member is the similarly characterised ELCA, and to which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia also belongs.
Also there's the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church. It began with a Siberian named Vsevolod Lytkin, who converted from Soviet era atheism to Lutheranism in Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union, at age 20 in 1987. In 1991 as the Soviet Union was passing into history Estonia became independent and Lytkin began missionary work back in Siberian, with support from our beloved synod (that's LCMS). In 2003 the result of his efforts, the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church, became independent of the more liberal WLF-affiliated Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. Pastor Lytkin now serves as the bishop of the SELC. While it is not affiliated with larger Lutheran bodies, in 2010 full recognition and fellowship was established between the SELC and LCMS.
I am pleased to say that the pastor of St Gertrude's Lutheran Parish in Yekaterinburg -- the city in which the Tsar and family were murdered in the Ipatiev House, on whose site the "Church on the Blood", whose full name is Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, now stands as mentioned above -- is a "friend" of Past Elder on Facebook. Seeing another "Catherine" in the city's name? It's there, named at its founding 18 November 1723 after St Catherine, name saint of Catherine I (Yekaterina), Tsarina and wife of then ruling Tsar Peter I the Great, who died 8 February 1725, after which she became ruler like the next Peter and Catherine duo (III and II/the Great). St Gertrude's has been there since Day One too. Check out their site here and please consider giving them a hand in their wonderful work.
Kind of all comes full circle, huh? That's what's cool about history. It makes the circle clearer, sometimes even gives one a clue there is a circle, an interrelation, at all, amid all this stuff of life that otherwise seems like so much dust from the past. And it makes where we are now clearer, which is why I get into all this stuff.
2014 is the 100th year since the start of the world war whose aftermath saw the end of the Russian Empire and rise of the Soviet Union (not to mention the end of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire). It is also the year in which the Crimea, which Catherine the Great had won back from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, was restored to Russia itself 60 years after the Soviet Union under Khrushchev made it part of the Ukraine in 1954.
You wonder what a different world would be now had Alicky listened to Grandma or Nicholas listened to dad. Or, if Alicky had decided confessing Lutheran faith was more important than literally anything else.
Nicholas' and Alexandra's feast day, following the church's longstanding custom, is 17 July.
02 July 2014
The Fourth Of July. 2014.
We did not actually declare independence from Mother England on the Fourth of July. What happened was, on the Fourth of July the Second Continental Congress approved a formal declaration explaining the Lee Resolution adopted on the Second of July which actually declared the independence. Here's the story.
I. Hostilities Break Out.
When the Revolutionary War began in April 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, independence was a minority opinion, and not the goal of the fighting. Most here hoped to remain under the English Crown, The objection. rather, was to the acts of Parliament re the colonies, who were not represented in Parliament, especially those exacting taxes. OK, so why did Parliament want taxes from the colonies? The biggest reason was to pay the huge war debt from The Seven Years War. That had concluded twelve years earlier in Europe, with England and Prussia and other German states (there was no Germany in the modern sense) against France, Russia, Sweden, Austria, Saxony and later Spain.
Our French and Indian War, which broke out in 1754, was actually a part of the Seven Years War, though the Seven Years War is dated from its European outbreak in 1756. It lasted another seven years until 1763, hence the name. Winston Churchill called it really the first world war, because hostilities happened not just in Europe or over just seven years, but in North America, India and West Africa in the combatants' colonies as well.. England won, more or less; things didn't change much in Europe per se, but England emerged the world's dominant colonial power.
But it left Mother England in huge debt. To pay for the war debt, all kinds of taxes were enacted by Parliament, particularly to bring in revenue from the colonies. England saw it as the colonies' fair share of being fought for; but the colonies thought that since they were not represented in Parliament that body had no right to tax them. England was stingy with currency in the colonies anyway, and many took to using the Spanish currency the dolar from La Florida, now a state but then a Spanish colony South of us, which is why we have "dollars" to this day.
The beef was with Parliament, not the Crown. Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others, proposed something like what is now the British Commonwealth, preserving unity with the English Crown but leaving Parliament the legislative body for England only, elsewhere being under legislative bodies where they were represented. It was even hoped that the Crown would intervene with Parliament for the colonies.
II. Tom Paine and Common Sense.
But unfolding events did not go that way, and brought more and more over to the cause of independence even if remaining under the Crown would have been their preference. A major boost came on 10 January 1776, when Thomas Paine published a 48 page pamphlet called Common Sense. It was published anonymously, for obvious reasons, and royalties went to support General Washington's Continental Army. It was signed, By An Englishman, which he was, from Thetford, Norfolk. He emigrated on the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, and arrived in Philadelphia on 30 November 1774, too sick from the typhoid fever that plagued the ship to get off the boat without the assistance of Franklin's physician.
In making the case for independence, Paine intentionally avoided the Enlightenment style, which used much philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome, and wrote more like a sermon, using Biblical references to make his case, so as to be understood by everyone, not just the educated. Now don't go thinking he was some sort of Christian founding father. Paine had no use for Christianity, be it Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, or for any other religion either. In later works he specifically rejected claims about Jesus as Son of God and Saviour as fabulous, literally, fables, nothing more than reworked sun worship, and advocated Deism, "by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues".
"Then" and "now" refer to the first and second of the three separately written parts of his The Age of Reason; the quotation is from the second part. Paine and Common Sense though were not much on the minds of the Continental Congress, which was more concerned about how a declaration of independence would affect the war for it. For that matter John Adams thought Common Sense "a crapulous mass", which we might express as a piece of, well you get the idea. Paine spent much time abroad, back in England, and eventually in France where he became part of the French Revolution too, but ran afoul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned 28 December 1793. He was scheduled to be guillotined, but the door to his cell was open to let a breeze in, and when his cell mates closed it the marking on the door faced inside. After the fall of Robespierre, 27 July 1794, he was released in November. He later became friendly with Napoleon, advising him on how to conquer England, but noting Napoleon's increasing dictatorship, although Napoleon though a gold statue of Paine should be in every city everywhere, Paine called Napoleon "the completest charlatan that ever existed".
He did not return to the US until 1802, at the invitation of President Jefferson. His support of the French Revolution then Napoleon, his disdain for religion of any kind, his antagonism to George Washington, and his distinctly un-Federalist views made him deeply unpopular. When he died, 8 June 1809 at 72 in Greenwich Village New York, his obituary, originally in The New York Citizen and reprinted throughout the country, said he "lived long, did some good and much harm" and only six people came to his funeral.
III. Independence.
It went a little differently for our revolution. The Virginia Convention on 15 May 1776 instructed the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress to propose to that body a declaration of independence. Richard Henry Lee, General Lee's great uncle, so proposed on 7 June 1776, hence the name Lee Resolution. It was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. Here is the text:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
Not all of the colonial conventions had so instructed their delegates to vote for independence, so support was rallied and debate put off. Meanwhile, a Committee of Five was formed to draft a formal declaration. The five were, John Adams (Massachusetts), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Robert Livingston (New York), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). Jefferson was given the job of writing the draft by the other four, who reviewed it. The declaration was proposed to the Congress 28 June 1776.
Congress approved the Lee Resolution on 2 July 1776. It was not unanimous. New York abstained from the vote, as their colonial convention had given them no instructions, which assent came on 9 July. Then on 4 July the Declaration of Lee's Resolution was approved, adding Lee's Resolution at the end. However, the delegates did not all sign it right then, most of them signing 2 August 1776! But the image of everybody signing endured and even the elderly Jefferson and Adams remembered it so, though it wasn't. Although John Adams thought 2 July would be Independence Day, from the outset 4 July has been celebrated as Independence Day.
IV. The Declaration of Independence.
In my humble opinion, The Declaration of Independence, explaining passage of the Lee Resolution, is one of the towering accomplishments of the mind of Man. Consider its famous words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
We now sometimes cynically say how could it be that someone who could write words like "all men are created equal" could also own slaves. We have it backwards. When the concept of democracy arose, in ancient Greece, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. Democracy was a function of the free class, those with the leisure to devote to becoming informed enough to participate in democracy; those who work do not have this leisure and cannot participate. Even by that great ancestor of our Constitution, the Magna Carta, in 1215, the first time ever that subjects forced concessions from a ruler and placed subject and ruler alike under law rather than the ruler's divine right to rule, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. The subjects were themselves rulers, lower ranking nobility.
The wonder is not then that someone who wrote "all men are created equal" could also own slaves; the wonder is that someone who owned slaves as part of the warp and woof of his time and economy could also envision "all men are created equal". And no-one was more aware of the untenable tension between the two, and the untenable nature of slavery, than the man who wrote those words. It is no discredit to him that it would fall to later leaders to work out the implications he knew full well; it is to his credit that these words were even there for later leaders to work out.
And while we're noting things, we may also note that equality of all men is not stated as just the way it is, or the way Man is. It says all men are created equal, which means there is a Creator, and that all men have rights not because that's just the way it is, but because all men have been endowed with certain rights by their Creator. It is because those rights are the endowment of their Creator that therefore they may not be taken away, which is also why the function of government to secure, not grant, these rights. The Creator is essential to this, and is the source of this, and that role is not diminished by our freedom to understand the Creator as we, not a government, or a government's state church, will. No Creator, no equality.
V. The Celebration of Independence.
The next year, 4 July 1777 -- the war was still on, btw, that didn't end until 1783 -- Bristol, Rhode Island, which had refused to supply the English army and got bombarded for it, fired off 13 cannon, one for each colony, at dawn and sunset to commemorate the first anniversary of the Declaration. The next year the British had taken Bristol, but in 1785, independence secured, Bristol established the Bristol Fourth of July Parade, the longest running Independence Day commemoration in the US.
The country's largest Independence Day thing is Macy's Fireworks Spectacular, which began with the bicentennial year 1976. And cities throughout the country do much the same on a smaller scale, not to mention in streets and backyards all over.
Maybe old John Adams wasn't so far off. The Fourth of July is indeed itself Independence Day, and has survived the lunacy of Day and Day (Observed) of the Uniform Holidays Bill of 1968, changing four Federal holidays from what they are to Mondays to create a three day week-end, a spirit which has infected the church calendar in modern revisions too. But I guess a Fourth of July and a Fourth of July (Observed) is too absurd for even the modern mind.
But it is not at all uncommon in those years when the Fourth falls on a work-week day as we now know it, which was along time coming in 1776, for fireworks etc to be done on the nearest week-end.
And get this though -- on the third Fourth of July ever, in 1779, the Fourth fell on a Sunday, for which reason it was celebrated the next day, Monday. How about that -- the original Monday week-end was because of the Lord's Day, Sunday! Guess old Paine wasn't the main force here. At least then.
Judas H Priest, now if the Fourth falls on a Sunday we want Monday off, not because Sunday is a Lord's Day, a little Easter each week, but because we didn't get a three day week-end! Not to mention our churches making Saturday Sunday now too, so we can get church "out of the way", er, increase participation, as if most people don't get it out of the way by just not going, either day!
Sunday is still Sunday, and the Fourth of July is still the Fourth of July. After independence was declared on 2 July, the next day John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail the following, though he thought it would be for the Second of July, the day independence was actually declared, but regardless, it stands as an enduring statement of what our commemoration of independence is all about, and that ain't three-day week-ends:
"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."
Roger that. Happy Fourth Of July!
I. Hostilities Break Out.
When the Revolutionary War began in April 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, independence was a minority opinion, and not the goal of the fighting. Most here hoped to remain under the English Crown, The objection. rather, was to the acts of Parliament re the colonies, who were not represented in Parliament, especially those exacting taxes. OK, so why did Parliament want taxes from the colonies? The biggest reason was to pay the huge war debt from The Seven Years War. That had concluded twelve years earlier in Europe, with England and Prussia and other German states (there was no Germany in the modern sense) against France, Russia, Sweden, Austria, Saxony and later Spain.
Our French and Indian War, which broke out in 1754, was actually a part of the Seven Years War, though the Seven Years War is dated from its European outbreak in 1756. It lasted another seven years until 1763, hence the name. Winston Churchill called it really the first world war, because hostilities happened not just in Europe or over just seven years, but in North America, India and West Africa in the combatants' colonies as well.. England won, more or less; things didn't change much in Europe per se, but England emerged the world's dominant colonial power.
But it left Mother England in huge debt. To pay for the war debt, all kinds of taxes were enacted by Parliament, particularly to bring in revenue from the colonies. England saw it as the colonies' fair share of being fought for; but the colonies thought that since they were not represented in Parliament that body had no right to tax them. England was stingy with currency in the colonies anyway, and many took to using the Spanish currency the dolar from La Florida, now a state but then a Spanish colony South of us, which is why we have "dollars" to this day.
The beef was with Parliament, not the Crown. Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others, proposed something like what is now the British Commonwealth, preserving unity with the English Crown but leaving Parliament the legislative body for England only, elsewhere being under legislative bodies where they were represented. It was even hoped that the Crown would intervene with Parliament for the colonies.
II. Tom Paine and Common Sense.
But unfolding events did not go that way, and brought more and more over to the cause of independence even if remaining under the Crown would have been their preference. A major boost came on 10 January 1776, when Thomas Paine published a 48 page pamphlet called Common Sense. It was published anonymously, for obvious reasons, and royalties went to support General Washington's Continental Army. It was signed, By An Englishman, which he was, from Thetford, Norfolk. He emigrated on the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, and arrived in Philadelphia on 30 November 1774, too sick from the typhoid fever that plagued the ship to get off the boat without the assistance of Franklin's physician.
In making the case for independence, Paine intentionally avoided the Enlightenment style, which used much philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome, and wrote more like a sermon, using Biblical references to make his case, so as to be understood by everyone, not just the educated. Now don't go thinking he was some sort of Christian founding father. Paine had no use for Christianity, be it Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, or for any other religion either. In later works he specifically rejected claims about Jesus as Son of God and Saviour as fabulous, literally, fables, nothing more than reworked sun worship, and advocated Deism, "by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues".
"Then" and "now" refer to the first and second of the three separately written parts of his The Age of Reason; the quotation is from the second part. Paine and Common Sense though were not much on the minds of the Continental Congress, which was more concerned about how a declaration of independence would affect the war for it. For that matter John Adams thought Common Sense "a crapulous mass", which we might express as a piece of, well you get the idea. Paine spent much time abroad, back in England, and eventually in France where he became part of the French Revolution too, but ran afoul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned 28 December 1793. He was scheduled to be guillotined, but the door to his cell was open to let a breeze in, and when his cell mates closed it the marking on the door faced inside. After the fall of Robespierre, 27 July 1794, he was released in November. He later became friendly with Napoleon, advising him on how to conquer England, but noting Napoleon's increasing dictatorship, although Napoleon though a gold statue of Paine should be in every city everywhere, Paine called Napoleon "the completest charlatan that ever existed".
He did not return to the US until 1802, at the invitation of President Jefferson. His support of the French Revolution then Napoleon, his disdain for religion of any kind, his antagonism to George Washington, and his distinctly un-Federalist views made him deeply unpopular. When he died, 8 June 1809 at 72 in Greenwich Village New York, his obituary, originally in The New York Citizen and reprinted throughout the country, said he "lived long, did some good and much harm" and only six people came to his funeral.
III. Independence.
It went a little differently for our revolution. The Virginia Convention on 15 May 1776 instructed the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress to propose to that body a declaration of independence. Richard Henry Lee, General Lee's great uncle, so proposed on 7 June 1776, hence the name Lee Resolution. It was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. Here is the text:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
Not all of the colonial conventions had so instructed their delegates to vote for independence, so support was rallied and debate put off. Meanwhile, a Committee of Five was formed to draft a formal declaration. The five were, John Adams (Massachusetts), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Robert Livingston (New York), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). Jefferson was given the job of writing the draft by the other four, who reviewed it. The declaration was proposed to the Congress 28 June 1776.
Congress approved the Lee Resolution on 2 July 1776. It was not unanimous. New York abstained from the vote, as their colonial convention had given them no instructions, which assent came on 9 July. Then on 4 July the Declaration of Lee's Resolution was approved, adding Lee's Resolution at the end. However, the delegates did not all sign it right then, most of them signing 2 August 1776! But the image of everybody signing endured and even the elderly Jefferson and Adams remembered it so, though it wasn't. Although John Adams thought 2 July would be Independence Day, from the outset 4 July has been celebrated as Independence Day.
IV. The Declaration of Independence.
In my humble opinion, The Declaration of Independence, explaining passage of the Lee Resolution, is one of the towering accomplishments of the mind of Man. Consider its famous words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
We now sometimes cynically say how could it be that someone who could write words like "all men are created equal" could also own slaves. We have it backwards. When the concept of democracy arose, in ancient Greece, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. Democracy was a function of the free class, those with the leisure to devote to becoming informed enough to participate in democracy; those who work do not have this leisure and cannot participate. Even by that great ancestor of our Constitution, the Magna Carta, in 1215, the first time ever that subjects forced concessions from a ruler and placed subject and ruler alike under law rather than the ruler's divine right to rule, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. The subjects were themselves rulers, lower ranking nobility.
The wonder is not then that someone who wrote "all men are created equal" could also own slaves; the wonder is that someone who owned slaves as part of the warp and woof of his time and economy could also envision "all men are created equal". And no-one was more aware of the untenable tension between the two, and the untenable nature of slavery, than the man who wrote those words. It is no discredit to him that it would fall to later leaders to work out the implications he knew full well; it is to his credit that these words were even there for later leaders to work out.
And while we're noting things, we may also note that equality of all men is not stated as just the way it is, or the way Man is. It says all men are created equal, which means there is a Creator, and that all men have rights not because that's just the way it is, but because all men have been endowed with certain rights by their Creator. It is because those rights are the endowment of their Creator that therefore they may not be taken away, which is also why the function of government to secure, not grant, these rights. The Creator is essential to this, and is the source of this, and that role is not diminished by our freedom to understand the Creator as we, not a government, or a government's state church, will. No Creator, no equality.
V. The Celebration of Independence.
The next year, 4 July 1777 -- the war was still on, btw, that didn't end until 1783 -- Bristol, Rhode Island, which had refused to supply the English army and got bombarded for it, fired off 13 cannon, one for each colony, at dawn and sunset to commemorate the first anniversary of the Declaration. The next year the British had taken Bristol, but in 1785, independence secured, Bristol established the Bristol Fourth of July Parade, the longest running Independence Day commemoration in the US.
The country's largest Independence Day thing is Macy's Fireworks Spectacular, which began with the bicentennial year 1976. And cities throughout the country do much the same on a smaller scale, not to mention in streets and backyards all over.
Maybe old John Adams wasn't so far off. The Fourth of July is indeed itself Independence Day, and has survived the lunacy of Day and Day (Observed) of the Uniform Holidays Bill of 1968, changing four Federal holidays from what they are to Mondays to create a three day week-end, a spirit which has infected the church calendar in modern revisions too. But I guess a Fourth of July and a Fourth of July (Observed) is too absurd for even the modern mind.
But it is not at all uncommon in those years when the Fourth falls on a work-week day as we now know it, which was along time coming in 1776, for fireworks etc to be done on the nearest week-end.
And get this though -- on the third Fourth of July ever, in 1779, the Fourth fell on a Sunday, for which reason it was celebrated the next day, Monday. How about that -- the original Monday week-end was because of the Lord's Day, Sunday! Guess old Paine wasn't the main force here. At least then.
Judas H Priest, now if the Fourth falls on a Sunday we want Monday off, not because Sunday is a Lord's Day, a little Easter each week, but because we didn't get a three day week-end! Not to mention our churches making Saturday Sunday now too, so we can get church "out of the way", er, increase participation, as if most people don't get it out of the way by just not going, either day!
Sunday is still Sunday, and the Fourth of July is still the Fourth of July. After independence was declared on 2 July, the next day John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail the following, though he thought it would be for the Second of July, the day independence was actually declared, but regardless, it stands as an enduring statement of what our commemoration of independence is all about, and that ain't three-day week-ends:
"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."
Roger that. Happy Fourth Of July!
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