Address given at the Oath and Installation of the Great Master and Knights Grand Cross of The Most Honourable Order of the Bath

Just over a hundred years ago, the Most Honourable Order of the Bath gathered in the Abbey for the Installation of a new Great Master. He was The Duke of Connaught, third son of Queen Victoria and, the only royal prince to serve as Governor General of Canada. HRH had been appointed Great Master in 1901, but had oversight of an Order that had lost some of its identity. There had been no installation ceremony on our Lady Chapel for over a hundred years. Both the King, George V and the Duke of Connaught were restless for some action and set their sights on a ceremony in June 1913. The Dean, I am afraid, was not quick to rise to the challenge, in April he wrote to Lord Chamberlain to complain that two months was impossibly short notice to arrange such a thing. After all, he said, his diary was full and he was going to be on holiday in May. Now, let me tell you, Deans choose their words carefully and Ryle then dared to suggest that arranging a service like this could turn into a ‘fiasco’. We do so dread a fiasco in the Abbey. Deans however, need to know their place. Peter Galloway’s History of the Order drily notes that all the protestations were shunted aside. 

‘What had to be done would be done and done on time’.

So, the service was finally fixed for 22nd July. I am not sure whether or not Dean Ryle got his holiday.

Enter stage left the Abbey’s formidable and forceful Sacrist. A man who had been in post for just two years, but would continue for another fifty-seven. Jocelyn Perkins, had many virtues, but resignation was not amongst them. It was he who masterminded the ceremonials and he thrilled at his own success.

It seemed as the though the old historic order had at last come into its own after the lapse of more than a century. The effect was too beautiful for words… The whole building being resplendent with the peculiar red shade of the Order.

The Installation of 1901 was celebration, it was theatre and it was display. That is part of what we witness today—the blazon and the bravura of the Bath. It was ever thus. From the first, there was careful story-telling. Our attention always directed to somethings and not to others. A back story was first provided by the John Anstis, Garter King of Arms in 1725. He insisted we imagined a great revival of chivalry—knights and their squires and ceremony. Anstis would never accept that this is a three hundredth anniversary. He would claim a thousand years or more. The badge of the three crowns, that members wear, is his creation. We have it partially because Anstis was convinced that it was the badge of King Arthur, the badge of the Round Table and knights of yore.

Our ceremony, the mantles and insignia, the swords and offerings of an Installation, the hints of chivalry, are all part of a carefully crafted story. And we are invited today to tell that story and act it out. If we are to do that with any conviction, we must take a slightly closer look.

Truly, we really are a mere three hundred years old. This is not the revival of chivalry that Anstis and Jocelyn Perkins longed for. Our beginnings lie with Robert Walpole and his ‘Robinocracy’. We were founded, to offer new rewards for loyalty—new promotion for friends, new favours for a new age. Anstis might have dreamed of the faith and morals of chivalry, but he was a hard-headed man who knew the price of everything and prospered as a result. He never believed that goodness was its own reward.

We must dig a bit deeper. Remember this is an Order, here are women and men who have lived lives of notable public service assemble and know that their service is recognized and acknowledged. We now gather round the idea that virtue and value are precisely not measured in pounds and pence. It is not chivalry, nor patronage that binds us together, but a shared and ordered belief in promise and service.

The Epistle to Philippians was read earlier and it is the thing we need to hear. Paul writing to Philippi a busy, bustling city, a place of old soldiers because a battle was fought where Brutus died, defeated by Mark Anthony. This was a community at odds with itself, loyalty was strained. Paul writes urgently tells them to learn to live together—learn what matters, what binds and guides:

… Finally, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely … think on these things. 

Imagine Paul clutching you by your lapels, by your mantle—‘Think on these things’. You must set before you what matters—excellence, goodness, and whatever is worthy of praise. Think of these things—they do not happen by accident or chance. We have to summon them up, we must remember them. And then, having done that, we must act. 

That is what the Most Honourable Order of the Bath should be, what it celebrates, what it does. Here is a place to know and name what service and excellence look like. Here is a community that can describe goodness and commit to a community that lives it out. The finery we see around us are slight symbols of a deeper dignity, of an excellence and honour that will only exist if we know it and name it. It is a conversation that must be had.

Paul knows that common culture gives way to competition, the community is sacrificed to the sect, or the self. We are here to say that must not happen. This is not chivalry, not patronage, not even reward and honour. This Order of the Bath exists to name excellence and to acknowledge goodness. It exists to think on these things—things that we will only know if we name them and make them known. Jocelyn Perkins thrilled to see the Order here, and so he should, but the real work lies outside the Abbey where the story has to be told where virtue and goodness are lived and served.