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Reprinted with permission
from Burke’s Peerage and Gentry
www.burkes-peerage.net
PATRON SAINTS
By Charles Mosley, Editor in Chief - Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage
To the hackneyed products
of spring - daffodils, Easter eggs and lambs (the last two also with
Christian associations) - we should add British Isles patriotic symbolism.
It is in this season that fall the days of three of the four patron saints
of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The topics associated with those
saints - their cults, their place in history, their flags and the sense of
national identity they foster - make them apt for discussion in a
periodical such as Atavus that is broadly devoted to family history
and 'heritage'.
Three of the Saints' days
occur within a six-and-a-half-week period: St David's Day for the Welsh on
March 1st, St Patrick's Day for the Irish on March 17th and St George's
Day for the English on April 23rd. This is apt, for the season is one of
hope. Even the Scots' St Andrew, with his lonely eminence in late autumn,
November 30th, prefigures the Christmas holidays, so that his feast is in
practice less gloomy than its position in the calendar suggests. At Eton,
the nobleman's traditional place of education, St Andrew's Day is even a
school holiday, whereas the other three saints' days are not.
None of the patron saints
of the four nations has wholly satisfactory qualifications for
representing his bit of turf. St David, who is thought to have flourished
in the 6th century, is the least bogus in that he seems not only to have
existed but to have done so as a Welshman. Indeed he was said to have been
of royal blood, being the son of Non (herself a Saint in Welsh tradition)
by Sandde, who was himself of the line of Cunedda. The legend that Cunedda
came with eight sons from southwest Scotland to expel the Irish from
Gwynedd, or roughly speaking North Wales, around AD 400 has been
effectively demolished in scholarly circles but retains a grip on popular
thinking.
Cunedda was traditionally
said to have been great-grandson of one Tacitus, obviously a Roman, though
not the historian of that name. It is probable that this implicitly Roman
and royal origin was grafted onto St David's ancestry five hundred years
after he existed. That is when the first known biography of him was
written, that by Bishop Rhygyvarch of St David's, who died in 1099. The
aim was to make David 'of good family', for it is a curious fact that
saints' lives then were presented for prestige purposes in as aristocratic
a light as possible.
But David seems never to
have operated in the deep north of Wales, 'deep' here being figurative
since the area is the Principality's most mountainous. And he has never
had his own flag. (The leek, though nutritious, even delicious when, say,
made into vichyssoise, is a poor substitute as national symbol.) Nor does
he have his own chivalric order. On the other hand one of the most
distinguished lineages in the peerage is that of Viscount Saint Davids (qv
BP&B).
St Patrick is a more
shadowy figure. The traditional account of his career, which may be a
complete invention, suggests he was Welsh-born too. He supposedly lived
during the last days of Roman rule in Britain, his father being called by
the Roman name Calpurnius and his grandfather being one Potitus, both of
them Christian and Calpurnius a landowner of middling rank. Not as grand
ultimately as St David, then, but of good yeoman or minor squirearchical
stock. Patrick was not initially even a voluntary settler in Ireland but
was taken there under duress, as a captive by sea raiders. It's rather as
if Alex Haley's ancestor in Roots, the slave taken to America from
his native West Africa, had become the patron saint of the United States.
Moreover, St Patrick spent
much of his working life in what is now France. His flag, as the
Burke's Peerage & Baronetage article 'Flags' (qv) points out,
is not really Irish either, but an English imposition. It may have become
identified with St Patrick and Ireland as far back as the 12th century,
which is when the Norman incursion into Ireland from Wales began (see
for example BP&B LEINSTER, D, and LANSDOWNE, M).
St Patrick's Day is
undoubtedly the biggest of the four saints' feasts, especially in America,
where huge numbers of the country's 240,000,000 or so citizens manage to
grub up some bit of Irish ancestry and drape themselves in green, no
matter how cruel green is to their complexions. St Patrick is also top of
the four saints when it comes to having his very own chivalric order. St
Andrew has (or had) one too, to be sure, but it was a Tsarist Russian
construct. (The order of St Andrew thought to have been planned for
Scotland by James V (reigned 1513-42) was never instituted.)
That of St Patrick, though
set up a little late in the day (1783), was behind only the Garter and
Thistle in terms of precedence and like them had only one rank, that of
knight. (In other words, there were no commanders or members, as with,
say, CVOs in the Royal Victorian Order or MBEs in the Order of the British
Empire.) It was intended as a highly prestigious honour for Irishmen or
those having close connections with Ireland, e.g., Viceroys.
Knights of St Patrick were addressed in writing as 'Sir Lucius O'Trigger,
KP'. The setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the instituting of
the Republic of Ireland have rendered it obsolescent. But although no more
additions have been made since the future George VI was inducted in 1936,
it still exists.
St George, who is also
patron saint of Aragon and Portugal, has had the toughest time. Until
recently he was much less venerated in England than his fellows in the
neighbouring Celtic lands. And even now he has been appropriated by the
most oafish exponents of patriotism, to wit football supporters, who smear
the colours of his flag on their faces, and taxi and delivery van drivers,
who fly his flag from their commercial vehicles. Inasmuch as he existed at
all, which is debateable, he lived around the end of the fourth century.
He is said to have been martyred at Lydda, in what was then Palestine, a
victim of the Roman Emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians. A
legend also grew up that he visited Britain. His association with
dragon-slaying dates from the late 6th century, but this may well be
transference to a Christian context of the Perseus legend, Perseus's
killing of the sea monster and release of Andromeda having according to
classical myth taken place in the region where Lydda subsequently
flourished.
His day became a feast
celebrated on a national scale throughout England under a decree of the
Council of Oxford in 1222. It was during the same century that his flag,
the red cross on a white background, was adopted as a national symbol of
England, though the same device was used by Germans, also specifically as
the cross of St George. In both cases it derived from experience in the
Crusades, when some way had become necessary of telling which part of
Christendom any given crusading group came from. When Oliver Cromwell
devised a new flag to represent Britain and Ireland during the Interregnum
he used the crosses of St George and St Andrew as components, placing the
former in the first and fourth quarters and the latter in the second
quarter. The St George cross is also the sign at sea that a British
Admiral is in command.
It was Edward III (reigned
1322-72) who appropriated St George as England's patron saint. His day,
April 23rd, is also thought to be that on which Shakespeare was both born
and died ? highly appropriate in England's national poet and dramatist.
Shakespeare's mother was one of the Ardens of Warwickshire (see Burke's
Landed Gentry 1972 edition). They are among a handful of families
whose greatness antedated the Norman Conquest. There is a family of
baronets called St George (qv BP&B). It is not an English baronetcy
but an Irish one, though the family is of French origin, first being heard
of in England in William the Conqueror's time. The Society of St George is
a patriotic sodality but is not part of the official state apparatus.
St George does have a
chivalric order named after him but he has to share it with St Michael. He
is further humiliated by being listed after his fellow saint in the
recitation of its full title, even though alphabetically he would come
first. The 'Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George', as it
is called officially, was founded in 1818. It has been enlarged many times
since. Gongs in it are given mostly to British diplomats, also to people
in British overseas dependencies who have devoted their lives (or at any
rate some part of their lives) to public service. The top chaps are
Knights or Dames Grand Cross (who put GCMG after their names), down
through Knights and Dames Commander (KCMG/DCMG after their names) to
Companions (CMGs, without 'Sir' or 'Dame' in front of the forename, unlike
the two higher ranks).
St Andrew, one of the
Apostles, is the only one of the four to have a cross named after him. It
is the x-shaped sort, that being the gibbet he was crucified on at Patras,
in Greece. One legend associated with him says his remains were taken to
Scotland and reinterred on the site of the university town of St Andrews.
He was adopted by the Picts in the 8th century, long before the
unification of Scotland, and went on to become Scotland's patron saint.
His flag is the white saltire (x-shaped cross) on a blue background. The
other way round, a blue saltire on a white background, was from around
1712 till the 1917 Revolution the flag of the navy of Russia, of which he
is also patron saint. St Andrews, the Scottish town which is named after
him and which by an idiosyncrasy is spelled without an apostrophe, is
currently educating Prince William, the next but one heir to the throne.
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