Читать книгу The Spirit of London - Boris Johnson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеHe brought back Christianity and got the bum’s rush
‘Mellitus?’ said the guide with a faint air of surprise. I felt as if I had gone into Waitrose and asked for something quaint – like a hogshead of mead. But Vivien Kermath is one of the accredited red-sashed guides of St Paul’s Cathedral. She knows her stuff.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Mellitus. AD 604. He built the first of several churches there have been on this site. Come this way.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘There isn’t any physical evidence of the original building, is there?’
‘No,’ said Vivien, ‘but we have an icon of Mellitus.’
‘An icon?’ I boggled.
We walked slowly through the great church of Christopher Wren, past memorials of Nelson and Wellington. We passed the spot where Lady Diana Spencer consecrated her ill-fated union to the Prince of Wales. We passed the list of former deans, including John Donne, and his illustrious predecessor, Alexander Nowell (1560), the Londoner who first worked out how to bottle beer – ‘probably his greatest contribution to humanity,’ said Vivien.
Right at the far eastern end of the church we came to the American memorial chapel, and there – perched above an illuminated book recording the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives in the Second World War – is Mellitus.
To be accurate, it is a rather recent and brightly painted icon-style portrait of how Mellitus might have looked, presented to the cathedral by the Greek Orthodox Church.
I stared at his long thin nose and his deep-set brown eyes, and tried to think myself back into the mindset of this valiant Christian saint, this Roman abbot who had been sent here on his dangerous mission more than 1400 years ago.
Behind Mellitus was London, tightly walled and neatly roofed, with an anachronistic dome of St Paul’s bulging to heaven. Showing off, I deciphered the Greek quotation on Mellitus’ open Bible.
‘And he who sat upon the throne said, behold, I make everything new.’
To make everything new. That was the mission of this Roman bishop to London. Fat chance.
Having paid my respects to the icon, I went out and stood on the steps of St Paul’s, and imagined the terrible scene that greeted him.
Roman London had waxed and waned over the years since Hadrian left. Some buildings fell into disrepair, but other notable structures were erected, including the two-mile wall that can still be seen, intermittently girdling the city, and which we think was built in around AD 200.
And then in the third century the Roman Empire entered a period of sustained inflation and chaos. London began to suffer. Lines of supply became too long. Civil servants went unpaid. Morale fell. By AD 410 the Saxon raids had become so terrifying that Londoners issued a desperate appeal to the emperor, Honorius – who deserves to go down in history as the man who gave this country a deep childhood rejection complex.
Sorry, said Honorius, no can do. The legions could not be spared. In 446 the Londoners tried one last time, begging for help from the great general Aetius.
‘The Saxons drive us into the sea, and then the sea drives us back into the arms of the Saxons! It’s a massacre,’ they wailed.
It was no use. London was forsaken, no longer deemed to be part of the empire. Rome readopted the crushing verdict of Augustus, that our country was not worth the bones of a single legionary.
Nothing now stood in the way of the most powerful Germanic tribes, and over they came – Hengist, Horsa, the lot of them, and the Romano-Londoners were put to the sword or driven to the Celtic fringes of the country. When Mellitus arrived at the place where I now stood, on what is now the crown of Ludgate Hill, he saw a post-apocalyptic landscape, a scene to bring despair to a proud Roman heart.
In my mind’s eye I erased the buses and the tourists, and I levelled the banks and the Costa coffees, and I could see London as it appeared in 604. The baths and the amphitheatre were wrecked, and swine were kept in the atria of the old villas. The secret of the hypocausts was lost to Britain, and it would be centuries before Londoners rediscovered central heating.
The governor’s palace had tumbled to the ground, and huge tracts of the city – where once tens of thousands of ambitious Roman Londoners had lived and dreamed – were covered in black earth. Archaeologists are divided as to whether this dark soil indicates some catastrophe, or whether the land had simply been turned over to farming.
Such people as remained were called names like Cathwulf and Ceawlin and, let’s face it, folks (or volks), they were essentially German. They had taken off the togas that Agricola had taught them to wear, and they wore trousers. Yes, the barbarians wore the trousers in London now. Yet it was worse than that; almost three centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, they now believed in the bosky German pantheon, and that their rulers were descended from Woden, to whom, every November, they made prodigious sacrifices of cows and pigs, so that the month was known as ‘blodmonath’.
In the words of Rowan Williams, when Mellitus arrived in London, ‘he found almost no relic of the Christian presence.’
The bishop had a plan. He gazed about himself there on the top of Ludgate hill, and his eye settled on a dilapidated Roman temple. That would do, he thought.
His mission had been conceived in AD 591, when Pope Gregory had been mooching about a slave market in Rome. He spotted some male slaves with fair skin and golden hair. Where do that lot come from? he asked.
They are English, the auctioneer replied – or ‘Angli sunt.’
Gregory clapped his hands and made a famous joke: ‘Haud Angli, sed Angeli!’ (‘Not Angles, but Angels!’) And tell me, he asked, are they Christian?
Unfortunately not, said the auctioneer. Right, said Pope Gregory. We’ll see about that.
First he sent Augustine, in 596, and Augustine had a remarkable coup. King Aethelberht of Kent was himself a pagan, but his wife Bertha had Christian leanings. Soon Aethelberht was won for Christ, and Augustine appealed for reinforcements. Business was brisk, he reported back to Rome, but he needed more props. Vestments, altar decorations, chasubles, religious texts – that kind of thing. Get them over here quick, he urged the Pope.
Gregory sent Mellitus and a handful of others, together with a celebrated letter on how to convert the heathen Brits. Whatever you do, said Gregory, don’t rush it. Don’t try to wean them off their pagan festivals and sacrifices. Let them enjoy it; let the fat and gravy run down their chins – but just tell them it is all to the glory of God. And don’t tear down their temples, Gregory advised. Just build new huts on the side of the old shrines.
Somewhere on the site of what is now our cathedral, the Roman Mellitus persuaded Saeberht, the nephew of Aethelberht, to let him construct a church. In the ruins of what had been a temple of Diana, he built a simple wooden nave, and dedicated it to St Paul.
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.
