LETTERS King Charles the Martyr
Sir: At a gathering of American Episcopa- lian bishops, there was a unanimous vote to add Dr Martin Luther King to the calendar of saints. But, despite support from several American dioceses, the addi- tion of King Charles the Martyr, to whom a number of churches in the United States are dedicated, was rejected with something like derision. The Right Reverend Michael Marshall, now directing the new Anglican Institute at St Louis, Missouri, was re- ported as saying: 'In England we would take something like this as a joke.' Doubt- less he holds fervently to the Common Prayer Book from which the feast day of the Royal Martyr was dropped in 1859; and thus may not be aware that it appears in the calendar of the Alternative Service Book of the Church of England.
As the Tractarians observed, Charles, by betraying the episcopacy, could have kept his life and his throne. He died 'for the cause of the Church and the cause of the poor'. Indeed he was 'biased to the poor' — to use a phrase popular in episcopal circles here — against the grandees with their Great Rebellion of the rich.
We, an Anglican and a Roman Catholic, honour his memory. Anglicans and Roman Catholics gave their blood and treasure for a Protestant monarch who stood for some- thing of the old English order. We recall Fr Charles-Roux preaching in an Anglican church on the Feast of the Martyr King about the ecumenism of Charles I.
John Biggs-Davison MP George Chowdharay-Best
House of Commons, London SW I
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