Sermon given at Matins on Sunday 6 March 2011
06 March 2011 at 10:00 am
The Reverend Andrew Tremlett, Rector of St Margaret's and Canon of Westminster
Month by month, here at Westminster Abbey, one of the Residentiary Canons takes it in turn to prepare sermons for this service – Matins – on each Sunday of that month. Sometimes these Sundays fall into a ready-made pattern, such as the season of Advent in December. Other times it’s more of a moveable feast – as is the case with Lent this year. So I find myself with three Lenten sermons, starting next Sunday, which will be on the spiritual writings of the 14th century, but am left with an odd Sunday today, ‘next before Lent’.
My colleague, Canon Treasurer Bob Reiss, has been leading us in a most helpful way during February in thinking about the importance of Christian perspectives in our public life, something Pope Benedict championed during his visit to the Houses of Parliament last September. Canon Reiss focused on three Christian virtues of integrity, truth, and forgiveness as crucial contributions by the Church – when we practice them ourselves – to our national debates.
Well, in this ‘spare’ Sunday I want to suggest a further area under the title of ‘Refuge and Sanctuary’ as a particularly important sphere for Christians to champion at this point in our history.
The root of this can be found in our first lesson from Exodus 34 which describes Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of stone on which were written the Ten Commandments. You’ll remember, of course, that this was the second occasion that he had received the Commandments and that the covenant had to be renewed after the rebellion of the children of Israel.
What’s intriguing is that the holiness of God appears to be contagious, catching, almost irradiating: Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him.
Moses had met with God and, in so doing, he was touched – we might almost say contaminated, made holy.
This lies at the heart of the Christian understanding of Sanctuary, where “The right of sanctuary (Latin sanctuarium, holy place), was the right of a person to protection or asylum within consecrated ground, founded on an ancient belief that one entering assumes part of the holiness of a place. It would be committing sacrilege to remove the person from the sacred place, so the right of sanctuary was considered inviolable.” Durham Cathedral’s famous lion and flame-faced door-knocker enabled a petitioner to claim sanctuary within the Cathedral for thirty-seven days.
To say that Westminster Abbey has a long association with Sanctuary is something of an understatement. From the Anglo-Saxon period St Peter’s Sanctuary was to be found in the north-west corner of the Abbey, and indeed the area immediately outside the west-end – home to Ecclesiastical Lawyers – is still addressed as ‘The Sanctuary’. For this reason the area around the high altar inside the Abbey, which in other churches is the Sanctuary, is called the Sacrarium.
Given its charter as a Sanctuary under Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), St Peter’s Sanctuary was “a large square keep, two stories high, with thick stone walls and only one exterior door, made of heavy oak.”
Intriguingly, and very appropriately, it stood on the site now occupied by the Middlesex Guildhall, which, under Lord Bingham’s vision and guidance, became the home of the UK’s Supreme Court. The last point of refuge.
Without doubt the most famous example of Sanctuary at the Abbey concerns Elizabeth Woodville, daughter of Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers, widow of Sir John Grey of Groby, the Lancastrian Knight who was killed at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. The first commoner to marry an English sovereign, the omens for Elizabeth Woodville were from the start not good.
She married Edward IV in secret on 1 May 1464 at her family home in Northamptonshire, with only her mother and two ladies in attendance. This was in direct contradiction to the political scheming of Richard Neville, “Warwick the Kingmaker”, who had been negotiating a marriage alliance with France. Though the widow of a Lancastrian sympathiser, a year later Elizabeth was crowned Queen Consort.
Warwick the Kingmaker, who had brought Edward to the throne in the first place, now made his peace with Margaret of Anjou to re-instate – albeit briefly – her own husband Henry VI to the throne. So 1470 finds Elizabeth Woodville seeking sanctuary here in Westminster Abbey, renting a house called Cheyneygates – now part of the Deanery complex – where she gives birth to the future Edward V.
Having fled to Burgundy, Edward IV returns to London, captures (and quite possibly murders) Henry VI and finally eliminates the Lancastrian threat in the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.
Before his death in 1483, Edward makes a number of changes to his will, including making his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Lord Protector both of the realm and of his son and heir, Edward V.
In a coup d’état Edward finds himself in the Tower of London, then a palace as much as a prison, soon to be joined by his younger brother Richard, who was claiming sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Acclaimed, but never crowned King of England, Edward the boy reigned for two months, until under the 1483 Statute of Parliament, Titulus Regius, his father’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville is declared invalid and the children therefore illegitimate. Richard Duke of Gloucester becomes Richard III and the rest is Shakespeare’s ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York’.
The fate of the Princes in the Tower is indeed moving. There are contemporary reports of their last days before they were murdered, most likely on Richard’s orders. The story does not end there – their remains were discovered some 100 years later, and Charles II directed the architect Sir Christopher Wren to design a white marble container and they were reverently placed in the Henry VII chapel here at Westminster Abbey, close to the tomb of the Prince's sister, Elizabeth of York. There they lie today.
And what became of Elizabeth Woodville? After Richard III publicly swore an oath that neither she nor her daughters would be harmed nor imprisoned, they came out of sanctuary at Westminster and returned to court. But Elizabeth made a pact with Margaret Beaufort, mother of the future Henry VII, and in December 1483 at Rennes Cathedral in Brittany he swore an oath to marry her daughter, Elizabeth of York. It was this marriage that brought the houses of York and Lancaster together, and ended the War of The Roses.
And whatever our own views about the individual cases involved, the place of the United Kingdom as a place of legitimate refuge, asylum, and sanctuary is both rooted in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and rightly something of which our nation in general and London in particular can be proud.
A good example lies less than two miles north of the Tower of London, on Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets, where the Jamme Masjid Mosque stands, home to a large Bengali Muslim community.
The original 1744 building housed “La Neuve Eglise”, the protestant Hugenots who had fled persecution in Catholic France. By the beginning of the next century it became a Weslyan Chapel and within decades it was the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, the centre of Russian and central European Jews for a century. Its current reincarnation for the Bengali community is just the latest version, and who knows what will come next.
So what are we to make of this tradition of upholding the right of religious belief under threat of persecution, of providing sanctuary to those who in our own day flee the threat of violence?
For certain, there will be many voices who question the legitimacy of the claims made. For certain, we need robust and cogent protection against those who abuse our national hospitality with instability and terror in mind.
But the fundamental principle remains, rooted in our national religious tradition, that we have a duty to play our part – along with other nations – in providing sanctuary, and that this will, in time, enrich both our common life and our understanding of God.