#royalism

Groupe de vétérans carlistes espagnols (plus précisément issus des troupes régulières de Catalogne ou de Navarre) vêtus de leurs attributs traditionnels, notamment la célèbre txapela gorria (le grand béret rouge espagnol).

Our choir at Portsmouth are performing Haydn's Creation this weekend, with its fabulous depiction of chaos and light, so it was interesting to see what seems such an eighteenth century concept represented nearly 150 years earlier at Staunton Harold Church in Leicestershire. This is a rare example of a church built during the interregnum, and a Laudian one at that, at a time when what we know of today as Anglican worship, with the Book of Common Prayer and its formal style of dress and worship, was outlawed.

The church was commissioned by royalist activist Sir Robert Shirley, who died of smallpox in the Tower of London in 1656. Shirley was too young to have fought in the civil wars of the 1640s, but an example of a new royalist, ardently loyal to the banned rituals of the Church of England.

Reproduction in the church of a painting of Sir Robert by Robert Walker - it is not clear where the original resides. Evidently he was a handsome fellow, and managed to produce five children before his untimely death.

Yet his design, while Laudian in its inclusion of a high altar, contains little else to offend puritan sensibilities. It is plain in style, its only significant imagery on the ceiling being sufficiently abstract to avoid contravening parliamentary ordinances against superstitious images. It compares and contrasts chaos (including a black dog said to represent Cromwell) on the left and order on the right, including the word for God in Hebrew and Greek.

The design was completed after Shirley's death and Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, a beneficiary of Shirley's will, erected this plaque at the entrance to the church, praising Shirley for doing the 'best things in the worst times' by building the church, as well as supporting 'distressed and orthodox' clergy who had lost their livings for refusing to support the puritan changes to the church.

Pedro V, by W. Corden, 

Rug chapel was built in 1637 by the (later) royalist William Salesbury.  It has been described as ‘high church’ and it is certainly true that one can’t imagine the puritan sensibility finding much to like about it.  There are angels and crosses:

There is religious symbolism, including this memento mori, in Welsh:

But the overall effect is more pagan than anything, a riot of frolicking beasts, flowers and vegetation: