Archbishop Justin Welby
Among the steadying qualities of
Anglicanism, a certain reliable boringness has always rated high on my list of
admirable clerical qualities. Very
little ecclesiastical business makes it to the pages of the National Enquirer or the News of the World. In the last couple of weeks, however, a
sensational story concerning the maculate conception of the sitting Archbishop
of Canterbury has raced like a cheetah through the Anglophone press.
The Most Reverend Justin Welby
himself remains, we have every reason to believe, above reproach. But a large blot has appeared in the
‘scutcheon. For all these years he
thought himself the legitimate issue of his mother and Gavin Welby, an
international whisky salesman. But DNA
testing has proved beyond doubt that his actual father was Sir Anthony Montague
Browne, one of the confidential aides and high-level secretaries of Winston
Church in the post-war years.
So far as historical records might indicate,
replacing Gavin Welby with Sir Anthony Montague Browne as one’s father could
definitely be regarded as “trading up”.
Gavin Welby was an alcoholic poseur who had abandoned the name (Weiler)
of his German Jewish forebears and successfully infiltrated himself into a very
okay Anglo-American social set that on the Anglo side included important
Conservative politicians and on the American important Democratic
politicians. He almost married Patricia
Kennedy in America and Vanessa Redgrave in England. Between the might-have-beens he actually
married a blueblood named Jane Portal, who was one of Churchill’s post-War
low-level secretaries. The future
archbishop was born almost exactly nine months following the exchange of vows
in Baltimore, where the couple had eloped.
While I hate to be unAnglican or prurient, I do conclude that there must
have been an intimate exchange between high- and low-level secretaries no more
than about forty-eight hours before the prelate’s mother and long supposed
father eloped. Learning about all this
for the first time years after the deaths of both an unknown actual father and
an imperfectly known, mistakenly assumed father would have been a shock for
anyone. In an age in which we are all
obsessed with the question of “identity”, Justin Welby has handled the
astonishing revelation with what I must regard as great aplomb; and he has
become of the object of well-deserved sympathy and admiration. As the great poet of ancient Jewry put it so
many centuries ago, and as the entire Church sings today: “Behold,
I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
Not that a medievalist is likely to
be shocked by evidence of irregularity in the sexual histories of the higher
clergy. In general, it is true, we are
dealing with irregular begetters rather than the irregularly begotten, but
there are numerous examples of the latter class as well. One of the more distinguished archiepiscopal
bastards of medieval England was Geoffrey FitzRoy, Archbishop of York from 1189
to 1212. He was one of the several
illegitimate children of King Henry II, more famous for his dealings with
Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Geoffrey had managed to become Bishop of Lincoln without ever having
been ordained a priest—which was a pretty good trick even in those days.
The REVE was a sclendre colerik man
There were large numbers of
priestly offspring in the good old days, and they had to be cared for. In fact clerical paternity could have a good
deal of social cachet. In Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” the thieving Miller who is
the chief butt of the satire is said to have a high-born wife (“ycomen of noble
kyn”), since the local parish priest is her father. She can boast of having the “blood of Holy
Church” flowing through her veins. The
priest, who is wealthy, intends to leave the parish treasury to his handsome
granddaughter, who is the other female lead in the fabliau.
As the Welby news was
breaking I was as usual in the midst of some random reading. I happened to pick up Du Pape by Joseph de Maistre, the arch-conservative thinker of
post-revolutionary France. This book argues
that the rescued unity of Europe, indeed of the whole world, depends upon a
recognition of a supreme papal power subject to no secular authority on
earth. But it includes, almost
incidentally, a learned dissertation upon, and warm defense of clerical
celibacy, here regarded as essential to the health of the body politic. De Maistre considered a married clergy among
the worst horrors of Protestantism, and it is doubtful that a viewing of Spotlight would have changed his mind.
Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821)
His argument jogged my memory, and
took me back to records of the trial of one of Welby’s more eminent
predecessors in Canterbury, Archbishop Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake in
Oxford in 1556. One of the papalist
prosecutors, the oleaginous Thomas Martin, a doctor of civil law from Bourges,
and the author of an admired work on clerical celibacy, sought to amuse the
court by asking Cranmer, with obvious sarcasm, whether the prelate’s children
“were bondsmen to the see of Canterbury”.
Without missing a beat the archbishop responded with a question of his
own: “whether, if a priest at his benefice kept a concubine and had
illegitimate children, those children were bondsmen to the benefice or not”. Merry England was still pretty merry, and the
milieu of the “Reeve’s Tale” had by no means disappeared. “I trust you will make my children’s cause no
worse,” said Cranmer.
