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The Defendant (Autumn, 2018) The DEFENDANT Newsletter of the Australian Chesterton Society Vol. 25 No. 2 Autumn 2018 Issue No. 97 ‘I have found that Reimagining the humanity is not incidentally engaged, Past - A Chesterton but eternally and Vision systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the by Karl Schmude gutter and diamonds into What if history had turned out differently? the sea. ; therefore I What if the past had taken another path - have imagined that the and shaped a different society? main business of man, however humble, is In 1931, Chesterton published a thought- defence. I have conceived provoking piece of historical speculation. Mary Queen of Scots that a defendant is chiefly He wondered whether, in the midst of the 16th century Reformation, a single marriage required when worldlings could have saved Christian unity. despise the world – that a counsel for the defence Chesterton’s essay first appeared - as did the would not have been out speculations of other prominent authors of place in the terrible day such as Hilaire Belloc and Winston when the sun was Churchill – in a book titled If It Had Happened Otherwise, which was edited darkened over Calvary by the English literary critic, Sir John and Man was rejected of Squire. (The essay was reprinted in 1950 men.’ in a posthumous collection of Chesterton’s G.K. Chesterton, ‘Introduction’, essays, The Common Man, and is available The Defendant (1901) online - http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/ Don John of Austria Common_Man.txt.) Reimagining the Past - His essay has a remarkably contemporary A Chesterton Vision (Karl Sir John Squire had a special interest in ring to it - in the light of the continual Schmude) ‘alternative history’. He thought that weakening of Christianity in the West and Pages 1-2 conjecturing about the past – of asking the new advance of Islam. The Daughter the Chestertons questions beginning with ‘if’, or ‘suppose’, Never Had (Aidan Mackey) or ‘if only’ – was not at odds with what Chesterton placed his conjecture in the Page 3 had actually happened. Rather it offered context of historic Christendom. He new ways of reflecting on historical pondered the impact of the imagined Father Brown on TV and in Chesterton’s Autobiography developments, and probing the inner and marriage on the course of European Pages 4-5 underlying realities of human history, not history – and, beyond that, on the history just the outward manifestations. of America. Chesterton’s Beaconsfield Page 6 Chesterton’s chapter was called ‘If Don In Chesterton’s judgment, the marriage Christopher Dawson John of Austria had married Mary Queen would have extinguished Scottish Calvinism Conferences of Scots’. He considered the changed at an early stage of its emergence. And, Page 7 course of history if the Austrian Catholic by Don John and Mary serving jointly military leader (most famous for his victory 2018 Chesterton Conference at on the English throne, it would have Campion College at Lepanto in 1571) had married the arrested the Protestant Reformation and Page 8 Scottish Catholic queen. kept England a Catholic country. The DEFENDANT 1 AUTUMN 2018 Chesterton was alive to the historical accident of the precisely what is attracting the progressive elites of the Reformation and the Renaissance taking place in the same West at present, deprived as they are of any compelling model century – the turbulent combination of divided religious of belief.) loyalties and a new surge of cultural energies. Yet Chesterton was also conscious of the negative aspects - He noted the comment of the Glasgow University Professor, what he called ‘the vetoes of primitive Islam; and most of its John Phillimore, a great friend of Hilaire Belloc’s, that ‘the virtues were vetoes.’ tragedy of Scotland was that she had the Reformation without the Renaissance.’ He thought that, to Mediterranean peoples at this time, ‘there passed across their shining sea merely the shadow of the For Chesterton, the significance of Mary Queen of Scots and great Destroyer.’ Don John of Austria lay in a unity of faith in the midst of cultural ferment: Reuniting a Christian Europe - and Resisting Islamic Expansion ‘There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallized anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a In proposing the unlikely union of Don John of Austria and Christendom that was entirely Christian. Mary Queen of Scots, Chesterton believed that it would have been decisive in reuniting the Christian civilisation ‘[In Mary and Don John] Religion and the Renaissance of the West - and resisting Islamic expansion. had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new “Historians quarrel,” he said, “about whether the English conquests and discoveries to their sons. under Elizabeth preferred the Prayer-Book or the Mass-Book. But surely nobody will quarrel about whether they preferred ‘They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry the Crescent or the Cross.” without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the ‘There was always in [Mary Queen of whole Church. Scots’] heart a hunger for civilisation. ‘There was a moment when religion could have It is an appetite not easily appreciated digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is now, when people are so over-civilised soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many that they can only have a hunger for others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers, as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock barbarism.’ of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the Were Chesterton’s conjectures entirely fanciful? Was there central Christian tradition.’ any basis for believing that a marriage could have taken place between Don John of Austria and Mary Queen of Scots? In a similar way, Chesterton argued, a united Europe would have made the emerging settlement of America ‘a very The spur to Chesterton’s speculation was a remark, in the different place’. early years of the 20th century, by the Scottish writer, Andrew Lang, in his historical study of King Philip II of Spain. He acknowledged that, at the time of the Reformation, the Catholic Church may have been ‘curiously negligent of the northern danger from Protestantism’; but this was Don John was the King’s half-brother, and following an because of its tenacious belief in ‘the eastern danger from earlier study, The Mystery of Mary Stuart (1901), Lang believed Islam. the [stopping of] the Turk from sweeping the whole that Don John ‘intended to carry off Mary Queen of Scots’. Mediterranean.’ Chesterton saw an immediate - and exciting - connection. What would have been the long-term effects of such a Chesterton did not disdain ‘the real virtues and the sane if marriage? sleeping virility of Islam’. It is now an unlikely scenario to contemplate - and, in any He readily admitted his sympathy for ‘that element in it that case, did not materialise. But pondering how different 16th is at once democratic and dignified’, an attitude which century Europe – and Europe and the Western world he suspected that most people in the West ‘would call subsequently - might have been, if a single union could have lazy and unprogressive’. (One might reasonably wonder been achieved between two European leaders, offered whether the ‘sane if sleeping virility of Islam’ might be Chesterton a stimulating opportunity to reimagine history._._ The DEFENDANT 2 AUTUMN 2018 The Daughter the Chestertons Never Had by Aidan Mackey Despite the painful deprivation of never having children of their own, Gilbert and Frances Chesterton were blessed by the arrival of Dorothy Collins, who served as Gilbert’s secretary for the last ten years of his life. This assessment of her contribution to their lives was penned by Aidan Mackey, who has enjoyed personal memories of the Chesterton era and knew Dorothy Collins. It was originally published in the obituary columns of the London Daily Telegraph on 10 September 1988, on the occasion of Aidan Mackey Dorothy’s death. Her role as the custodian of Chesterton’s voluminous writings, not only during his lifetime but for many years after his death as literary executrix, cannot be overstated. She continued to live in Top Meadow Cottage, near Chesterton’s home in the small town of Beaconsfield, where his papers were stored. In addition to assisting scholars with access to his works, she edited and published several collections of his writings, including The Glass Walking-Stick and Other Essays (1955) and Chesterton on Shakespeare (1971). Aidan Mackey’s 1988 obituary is republished in The Defendant with his kind permission. Dorothy Collins, who has In recognition of Dorothy Collins’s supporting role, GKC died aged 94, played a major inscribed copies of his books to her, writing in his Collected role in the present upsurge Poems: of interest in G.K. Chesterton whose secretary she became Here you watch the bard’s career in 1926. Month by month and year by year Writing writing writing verse Dorothy Edith Collins was Worse and worse and worse and worse born in Ashstead, Surrey [south-east of London] in His study of Thomas Aquinas was dedicated “To Dorothy 1894 and educated at a Collins, without whose help the author would have been private school on the south more than usually helpless”. Dorothy Collins coast. Chesterton died in 1936, and Frances two years later. Dorothy She was working in London when a friend persuaded her Collins then became his literary executor, a post she never to go to Beaconsfield to become the secretary to GKC who – relinquished, sorting out the tangles of copyright and because of his undemanding approach to such secretarial availability as his books were reissued in many countries, and skills as typing, spelling and shorthand – had suffered a compiling the stream of new collections and books, including succession of secretaries whose competence was less than The Coloured Lands, Chesterton on Shakespeare and The adequate.
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