A few weeks ago, on this website, I mused somewhat bitterly about my experience of the secular fundamentalist culture of contemporary England during a short visit to my homeland in January of this year. My comments elicited a response from a good friend of mine who chastised me mildly for my “unpatriotic” vitriol. Since I have always considered myself a patriotic Englishman, his chastisement has prompted this defence not only of myself but of my homeland also.
I’ll begin with the words of Rudyard Kipling:

If England was what England seems
 An’ not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass, an’ paint,
 ‘Ow quick we’d chuck ‘er! But she ain’t!

I’ll begin by saying what England ain’t. She ain’t the people who happen to be living within her “sceptred isle” at any particular time, and she certainly ain’t the Muslim fundamentalists living within her towns and cities who feel nothing but contempt for her. Nor is she the millions of godless heirs of anglo-saxons and celts, alive today, who know nothing of their roots and who think England is nothing more than a football team to be cheered drunkenly during the world cup every four years. And England ain’t the sundry secular fundamentalist fanatics who were so incensed by my wearing of a crucifix during my recent visit to London. In short, England ain’t any of these things, even though these things are the ugly face that passes for England today. This is only “what England seems” not what she is.

“Seems, Madam! Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’.” Hamlet knows the difference between that which is and that which only seems to be, and so do I.

Here is what England is:

She is more than a thousand years of uninterrupted Catholic faith, from St Alban, the first English martyr, killed during the Roman occupation in the 3rd century, to the martydrom of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More in 1535. She is the hundreds of martyred Catholics who died to keep their nation within the one true fold of Christ during the penal times following Henry VIII’s usurpation of the church in England. She is the forty canonized marytrs, the eighty-five beatified martyrs, and the countless other martyrs who have not been officially recognised by the Church. She is Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood; she is Sir Gawain and Chaucer; she is Byrd and Tallis; she is Walsingham and Glastonbury; she is Austen and Dickens, Newman and Hopkins, Chesterton and Belloc, Waugh and Wodehouse, Lewis and Tolkien. She is Shakespeare! This is the England of our dreams, and our dreams are so much more real, in any meaningful sense, than the nightmare that the modern inhabitants of England seem to prefer. This is the England to which I owe my allegiance; the England of the saints and martyrs; the England of the poets and bards; and the England of the Greatest Bard of all. I’ll conclude by letting the Bard wax lyrical on the England of my dreams:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England