The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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Christianity was back in the soil of London – but only precariously.
Sometime around 616 or 618 both Aethelberht and Saeberht died, and Christianity lost its two most important Saxon patrons. According to the Venerable Bede, the son of Aethelberht, Eadwald, behaved particularly badly. He immediately reverted to paganism and announced that he was shacking up with his father’s wife – not the sort of thing to tell Pope Gregory.
As for the sons of Saeberht, they mocked the good Mellitus. They spotted the new bishop of London giving the host – the body of Christ – to communicants in his little wooden church.
‘Give us some of that bread, O Mellitus,’ said the pagan Saeberht boys.
‘Well,’ said Mellitus, ‘you can have some bread but only if you believe in Christ and let me lave you with holy water.’
‘Lave us?’ said the Saeberht boys. ‘We don’t want to be laved. Just give us some of that bread.’
‘Sorry,’ said Mellitus. ‘You can’t have one without the other. If you want the bread, you have to believe.’
At that point, alas, the uncouth youths abused the bishop roundly and he was driven out of London, never to return.
In the end Mellitus’ legacy was to prove astonishing. The building originally founded by Mellitus was to become the symbol of national defiance during the Blitz, and to this day the glimpses of St Paul’s are so sacred to Londoners that they are protected by elaborate viewing corridors. No building may impede the sight of the dome from Richmond Hill, Primrose Hill and other high spots around the city.
And yet when Mellitus was kicked out, paganism remained so strong in London that it was not until 654 that Cedd succeeded as second bishop and resumed the see of London. ‘Long time no see!’ as he doubtless put it in his first sermon.
I thought of Mellitus one evening in 2010 when I had the honour of meeting the Pope. I stood on the tarmac at Heathrow, a representative of this modern metropolis with its myriad races and beliefs; and I felt vaguely that I should offer some apology or explanation for the irreligiousness and hedonism of my fellow Londoners.
I felt like some woad-painted, butter-haired, betrousered Saxon savage, forced to explain himself and his city to this effulgent vision from Rome. At last the Pope appeared from his Alitalia jet, evidently exhausted but still somehow glowing – like a sugared almond – in his white vestments and scarlet slippers.
‘It all goes back to 410,’ I said, when we were on a sofa together in the Royal Lounge.
He looked at me keenly, as though trying to remember what had happened at teatime.
What I meant, I babbled, was that the decision of Honorius was of huge psycho-historical importance for this country. Britain was unlike so many other parts of the Roman Empire in that we underwent a complete reversion.
A city that had once been entirely Roman and entirely Christian had lapsed, had lurched back into the arms of paganism and sin.
And if time had allowed, I would have gone on to blurt my feeling that there would always be a sub-tectonic paganism and wildness about London; and that our fifth-century experience of a sundering from Rome – and a betrayal by Rome – would always leave us with a subconscious mistrust of any great continental scheme for a religious or a political union.
I was about to tell him of my theory that the umbilical severing by Honorius was a partial explanation for everything from Henry VIII to the British refusal to join the Euro.
Luckily for the Holy Father, I had only embarked on a couple of sentences when a cavalcade of cardinals came to take him to his hotel.
‘Very interesting!’ he said.
***
It is easy to laugh at poor Bishop Mellitus, hounded out of London by the ungrateful pagans, but in recapturing the city – and the country – for Christianity, we could surely argue that he was a figure of decisive historical importance.
Imagine if he had never been able to found that frail wooden Church of St Paul’s, or to replant the tender bloom of faith in the blackened soil of post-Roman London. Imagine if the British elite had continued – to this day – to swear by brooks and glades and rocks and not by Jesus Christ. The British Empire would frankly have had a very different flavour. So would the story of the United States of America. We would be talking about ‘one nation, indivisible under Woden’, and instead of Christmas or Thanksgiving, I expect we would all be complaining about the excessive commercialisation of Bloodmonath.
This fantasy will of course be dismissed by believers in a divine Christian plan, but for the next three hundred years after Mellitus the pagans were never far away, and their methods were vicious.
Of Mellitus’ church there is no sign today, and indeed there is no trace of early Saxon habitation in the old Roman London. The Saxons moved out west to huddled settlements at Aldwych and Covent Garden, and up the Thames came the enemy.
One man can take much of the credit for beating them off, and for reoccupying and rebuilding the ancient city. After centuries of decay, he was sufficiently literate to revive the memory of Rome.
He restored London and suffers from being a dead white male
It was only a hundred years ago that Britain could claim to be the greatest power on Earth. Royal Navy Dreadnoughts roamed the seas. Statues were raised in honour of the founder of the Navy, an axe-wielding, cross-gartered fellow with a flowing beard and deep-set eyes beneath a kind of Santa Claus hat.
Every child in England knew his name, and at one festival in his honour Lord Rosebery made a speech in which, among other superlative compliments, he hailed Alfred as ‘the ideal Englishman, the perfect sovereign, the pioneer of England’s greatness.’ E A Freeman, the Whig historian, later called him ‘the most perfect character in history.’
Alfred has not only a claim to be the father of the navy, and therefore of Empire and the entire supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world – still just about alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century – but he also revived learning in a benighted land, he beat off a sadistic pagan enemy, he united his country and will go down as a man who saved London from oblivion.
And yet today Alfred is almost ludicrously unfashionable. His images are being lost or covered up; his statue in Wantage is regularly vandalised. Children are taught nothing about him: it is as if we are determined to send him back to the Dark Ages from which he rescued us.
In so far as we have relics of Saxon London before Alfred, they are dispiriting stuff. There are broken-toothed combs carved from the shoulder bones of sheep. There are pewter baubles you might expect to find at Camden Lock Market, except not so good.
There is the splotchy-glazed primary school pottery, and when you sit in one of the conjectural wooden dwellings in the Museum of London you have the impression of hippy squalor. There is no brick, no stone, no frescoes, no mosaic and certainly no public sanitation of a kind the Romans had used.
Perhaps some Anglo-Saxon historians will insist that we are talking of a golden age – but you have only to squat in that reconstructed hut to smell the smoke in your matted hair and the aromas of the pigs, and soon you feel a Dark Age dankness seeping up your ankles, to be followed by the chilblains and the pustules and an overall life expectancy of thirty-two.
The population had fallen cataclysmically since the days of Hadrian – to perhaps a few thousand. Londoners owed a distant allegiance to Essex or to Offa, the brutish and illiterate king of Mercia. They had moved out of the old Roman city, apparently because of some superstitious dread of the ruins.
Still, it seems there was something to be said for Lundenwic, the area they settled around the Strand and Aldwych. We have found pots that show