It is St George’s day, the patron saint of Ethiopia (above), Portugal, sheep, Brazil, Kerala, Barcelona, the United States Cavalry, farmers, and England. One of the most celebrated martyrs of the early church – he died today in the year 303 – he is supposed to have been a soldier executed for his Christian protest against unjust killing. In a twist of irony, he became a celebrity saint when the Crusaders besieging Antioch in 1099 catapulted 200 Turkish severed heads over the city wall and claimed that St George helped them to victory. Also known to slay dragons.
Today in 1956, CS Lewis quietly married Joy Davidman, an American writer, at a registry office in Oxford. Davidman had been divorced by her husband two years earlier, and was living in Oxford, but the British Home Office had refused permission for her to stay in the country. Lewis married her, he claimed, as a formality to help her stay, but the truth was that he was deeply in love with her.
‘She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.’ CS Lewis
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested today in 1849, along with the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle. The paranoid government of Tsar Nicholas I suspected them all of conspiring at revolution. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad, but a last-minute letter from the Tsar halted the execution while he was standing waiting to be shot. He spent the following five years in exile in Omsk, Siberia.
William Temple was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury today in 1942 after 13 years as Archbishop of York, and 46 years after his own father, Frederick Temple, became Archbishop. He spoke powerfully from the left wing on social issues, and was influential in the gestation of Britain’s welfare state. Sadly, his time on the throne of Canterbury was a mere two years.
Someone who did rather more for England than St George was William Shakespeare, who supposedly was born and died today, in 1564 and 1616.
Image: A.Davey