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As Platinum Jubilee celebrations were just about to start one year ago, it seemed apposite for me to continue to remember the Queen.
Yesterday’s post pointed out that she was the most portrayed person in all of history.
Although the Queen led a charmed life for all her 96 years, she had a sense of Royal duty from the time she was 10 years old when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated.
On September 8, 2022, Politico had an interesting obituary with specially commissioned portraits of the late monarch. Given that Politico is not at all associated with love of the monarchy, the portraits were sensitively done.
Excerpts follow from the article, emphases mine.
Regal silence
There is no question that the Queen’s demeanour helped her to make her 70 years as Head of State dignified and memorable. She was:
a revered figure who donned crowns, opened parliaments and asked people who they were and what they did at garden parties. It was she who stared out Mona Lisa-like from banknotes and who became head of state to 150 million people, from Papua New Guinea to Canada, and one of the most famous people of her time …
Lauded globally — she stood alongside the Dalai Lama and the pope as one of those rare definite articles who seemed to be above scrutiny. So much so that even die-hard republicans would temper their calls for an end to the monarchy by saying: “But the queen has done a fantastic job.”
She succeeded at that job, in no small part, by making a virtue out of silence. She stubbornly refused to be interviewed, examined or subjected to scrutiny. While younger royals broke the fourth wall of monarchy, the queen remained quiet and immutable.
Indeed, it was by keeping her official alter ego as vague as the unwritten British constitution, and her private persona hidden away altogether, that Elizabeth II became the most successful sovereign since Victoria, bringing relevance to a feudal institution that was 200 years past its sell-by date.
But because of that, in writing the story of her life, it is almost impossible to find out who she really was beneath the hats and robes and jewels.
The queen was an abstraction: a role, like any other — and it was the person behind her, Elizabeth Windsor, who expertly played the part …
This is the life of Elizabeth Windsor.
Life at 145 Piccadilly
Politico tells us of Princess Elizabeth’s birth:
She was born by caesarean section on April 21, 1926, to her mother, also Elizabeth, the Duchess of York. As was then the custom, the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, was present — just in case she was swapped for someone who was not of royal birth.
As Princess Elizabeth, she was third in line to the throne, with her uncle Edward the presumed heir apparent.
Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, had no ordinary London residence:
Official biographers like to make much of her “ordinary childhood” and the very normal-sounding York family address at 145 Piccadilly in the heart of London. In truth, the address was no common or garden terraced home. It was a substantial palace, with 25 bedrooms, a ballroom, a library and an enormous garden.
Royal Central has more:
Following her birth on April 21 1926 at the home of her maternal grandparents at 17 Bruton St Mayfair, the baby Princess Elizabeth moved to the house that her parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, had taken at 145 Piccadilly W1. This would be the house in which she would spend the first years of her childhood, as well as White Lodge in Richmond Park. These were the residences where the young princess would live together with her parents and her younger sister Princess Margaret Rose, who was born four years later in 1930. In 1932, the Duke and Duchess of York began to use Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park as a private country residence, when Princess Elizabeth was aged six. During this period of her childhood, Princess Elizabeth also spent time at the country homes of her paternal grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, and her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
The white terraced, stone-faced residence had a large garden and a semi-basement kitchen. Princess Elizabeth is said to have been taken out by her nanny from this house, for a stroll in the pram through nearby Mayfair to Hyde Park. An old British paramount newsreel recording from 1935 shows the Duke and Duchess of York at 145 Piccadilly, arriving and leaving the property. Among the photographic collection of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, is a photograph of Queen Elizabeth together with the corgi dog Jane taken in the grounds of 145 Piccadilly in around 1936, the fateful year which saw both the abdication of Edward VIII and the accession of her husband the Duke of York to the British throne as King George VI.
The site has been home to the InterContinental London Park Lane for nearly 50 years. The hotel’s history page tells us:
Historical accounts recall a white terraced building, indistinguishable from those on either side of it. There was a semi-basement kitchen, ‘like the giant’s kitchen in a pantomime with its immense shiny copper pots and great fire-range’, Lisa Sheridan.
An extensive garden at the back, shared with other houses, added an element of community. Elizabeth lived in a suite of rooms at the top of the house, consisting of a day nursery, a night nursery and a bathroom linked by a landing, with wide windows looking down on the park. It was not unusual for her nanny to put her in her pram and take a two-hour stroll through Mayfair into Hyde Park.
Other stories relating to Elizabeth’s childhood at 145 Piccadilly told of the Princess allegedly playing games by fetching a small toy, such as a teddy bear or a ball, and dropping it from the nursery landing down the stairwell onto visitors as they arrived at the house.
The best modern day representation of the late Queen’s childhood at 145 Piccadilly can be found in the multiple Oscar-winning film, The King’s Speech. Scenes of the young family trying their best to enjoy London life in the heart of Mayfair during the years of the Depression were actually filmed at 33 Portland Place, but the so-called ‘shabby chic’ interiors are said to be in keeping with the style of the house at that time …
Years later:
The hotel was opened by His Grace the 8th Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley on 23rd September 1975.
Returning to Royal Central:
According to the website ‘Westend at War’, the building was destroyed by a high explosive bomb on 7 October 1940. The same website quotes the source Westminster in War (William Sansom, 1947) to explain that in 1940, the site at 145 Piccadilly was being used as a chief office for a “relief and comforts fund”. The permanent record that was made out by the ARP on this date describing the damage that the house had sustained, is today kept in the Westminster City Archives.
The former 145 Piccadilly is at No. 1 Hamilton Place, the site of which is occupied today by the upscale InterContinental London Park Lane Hotel. The hotel was constructed between 1968- 1975 under the direction of Sir Frederick Gibberd. Close to the five-starred London Hilton and the Four Seasons hotels, it overlooks Hyde Park Corner, together with the Wellington Arch and statue of the Duke of Wellington. Apsley House, also known as Number One, London is located on Hyde Park Corner and is the London home of the Dukes of Wellington. The InterContinental London Park Lane is proud of the royal connection with the location on which the hotel stands and has been welcoming guests ever since it opened.
Scene Therapy has photos of young Princess Elizabeth with her two first corgis as well of photos of 145 Piccadilly as it was when she lived there.
We discover that it was a modest residence by Royal standards of the day:
In 1926, Princess Elizabeth of York was born in her maternal grandparents’ Mayfair townhouse at 17 Bruton Street. A year later, the new family moved a few blocks away to Piccadilly; one of the most exclusive addresses in the capital. Piccadilly is a busy central London road that stretches from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, with famous establishments lining the route such as The Ritz, The Royal Academy and Fortnum & Mason. Throughout the 19th century and into the early 1900s, Piccadilly was also home to some of the most elite townhouses in the country, with residents including the Rothschilds, the Duke of Wellington, Lords and Vice-Admirals. The handsome homes that made up ‘Piccadilly Terrace’ featured spacious rooms with high ceilings and large windows set across 4-5 floors including servants quarters, all with views of Green Park.
For senior royals to reside in a townhouse, however grand, was considered rather unusual. At the time, however, Britain was suffering significant austerity thanks to The Great War and subsequent Great Depression, so King George V requested his family reign-in their spending and consider more ‘modest’ abodes. So The Yorks lived at 145 Piccadilly during the week and retired to The Royal Lodge on the Windsor Estate at weekends.
145 Piccadilly featured an abundance of panelling, mouldings and ornate plasterwork, with drawing room details gilded in gold and double doors encased in arched doorways. The interiors are packed with antique furnishings including a large 17th Belgian tapestry hung at the rear of the drawing room featuring a woodland scene woven by Marcus de Vos, and a ceramic and gilt-bronzed mantel clock by Balthazar à Paris, both now housed in the Royal Collection Trust. Other furniture and objects from 145 Piccadilly can now be seen in various royal residences across the UK, such as the portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother that stands at the rear of 145’s drawing room, which can now be seen hung in the library ante-room at Prince Charles’ Clarence House.
The houses that made up Piccadilly Terrace featured the full range of floors expected of a smart aristocratic residence including an attic floor, usually home to servants’ sleeping quarters, a chamber floor for principle bedrooms and nursery rooms (such as the Day Nursery and Night Nursery as seen included in the images below), a drawing room floor, which housed private rooms including a boudoir and spacious library, the ground floor, home to reception rooms, and a basement where staff rooms, kitchens, pantries and other utility rooms featured.
… Though 145 Piccadilly was considered ‘modest’ by royal standards, the interiors proved to be more befitting of the London homes of other aristocrats such as the nearby Apsley House or Spencer House, which both still stand today. 145 and its adjacent homes on Piccadilly Terrace were damaged during WWII before eventually being torn down …
Returning to Politico, we learn of the nannies:
Photos of the era depict Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret being doted on by their mother and father, but in truth, they were brought up by an army of servants and rarely saw their parents. Childcare was left to two nannies: Clara Knight, a strict disciplinarian who instilled fear and good manners, and Margaret MacDonald.
Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald
Incredibly, Margaret MacDonald remained by the Queen’s side for life:
MacDonald was the only person outside of the royal family who was allowed to call Elizabeth by her family nickname Lilibet, and she shared a bedroom with her charge until she was 11 years old. Lilibet’s first word, “Bobo,” was addressed to MacDonald — and the nickname stuck.
Every morning, MacDonald brought Elizabeth a cup of tea, laid out her clothes and ran her daily bath. Effectively prohibited from marriage — to have done so would have cost her the job — MacDonald dedicated her life to the queen until her death in 1993.
“In her later years Bobo held a unique position in Buckingham Palace, having her own suite, no duties, and enjoying a closer personal friendship with the queen than practically anyone else, including some of the queen’s closest relatives,” wrote Douglas Keay, author of “The Queen: A Revealing Look at the Private Life of Elizabeth II.”
But we know nothing more. The loyal servant never gave an interview, never discussed her relationship with her mistress and died with her secrets intact.
Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford
Marion Crawford was the opposite of Bobo MacDonald with regard to discretion.
Crawford was the princesses’ governess.
Most people will know her story, as she was one who fell from grace for disloyalty.
Politico summarises what happened:
Crawfie was the Yorks’ very own Mary Poppins, steering her charges through the change in their circumstances when their uncle abdicated and their father unexpectedly became king. If Bobo was a surrogate mother, Crawfie was an older sister, role model and friend.
But by 1947, neither Elizabeth nor Margaret had need of a governess, and aged just 39, Crawfie was retired.
Two years later she accepted an offer to write a book called “The Little Princesses,” which caused a sensation when it was published in 1950.
Despite having approved the project, the queen mother declared that Crawfie had “gone off her head,” and the woman who had devoted the first part of her life to the monarchy was unceremoniously ghosted.
The incident was all the more remarkable given the book was a wholly affectionate memoir and showed the royal family in a very good light. Her fate was probably sealed by one or two turns of phrase that hinted at the king’s bad temper during the war.
Nonetheless, “to do a Crawfie” became royal slang for treachery. Deprived of her grace and favor, Crawford disappeared from official records and narratives in a manner that would have put Soviet propagandists to shame.
The impact on Crawfie cannot be understated. She attempted suicide twice. Later in life, she moved close to the Balmoral estate in the hope that she might one day chance upon her old charge and that amends could be made. But the moment never came. When she eventually died in 1988, the royal family sent not so much as a wreath to the funeral.
We don’t know how this affected Elizabeth. Nor do we know how much of a role she played in perpetuating Crawfie’s misery. But this brutal and callous dispatching of such a close confidante and loyal friend speaks volumes about the family that is sometimes referred to as “The Firm.”
The lifeblood of the monarchy is self-preservation. Nobody is indispensable. Nobody is bigger than the machine. Throughout the queen’s reign, that ruthless self-preservation — so at odds with her image — would rear its head again and again.
It seems as if Politico missed Tatler‘s 2020 article about Marion Crawford and her husband, which is much more nuanced. It comes complete with photos and its author, Wendy Holden, tells an amazing story:
… the original scandal of the Queen’s life – also chronicled in a book that lays bare royal secrets – doesn’t exist in the Windsor Cloud. For 70 years, it successfully ‘disappeared’. Few accounts of the time afford it more than a footnote. The protagonist’s name, though, remains a byword for betrayal.
The unimaginable bounder this suggests was none other than a young Scottish teacher. Marion Crawford was governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, aged six and almost two when she arrived in 1932. She stayed for 17 years. ‘Crawfie’, as they fondly called her, was not only their teacher, but their constant confidante and companion.
Crawfie guided the girls through the drama of the abdication of their uncle, the upheaval of their parents’ accession and the trauma of the Second World War, when she took them to Windsor Castle’s dungeon bomb shelters as Heinkels roared above. Later, she was there when Elizabeth met Philip. Yet, at the end of her service, the royals cut her off. The reason? A harmless memoir, The Little Princesses.
I came across it by accident in a second-hand bookshop on a rainy day. It immediately became the inspiration for the royal-themed novel I’d always wanted to write. The Governess, my new book, fictionalises Marion Crawford’s time with the Royal Family. It shines a new light not only on the Queen’s little-known childhood, but on the lively young teacher who helped make her the monarch she is today …
The Duchess of York poached her sister’s servant:
It could have been so different. Crawfie never intended to teach royalty – rather, the other end of the social scale. Her vocation, she felt, was in the slums of Edinburgh. ‘I wanted desperately to help… but,’ as she puts it in The Little Princesses, ‘something else was coming my way.’ That would be the famously charming Queen Mother (then Duchess of York), whose sister Crawfie worked for during the holidays. Spotting the young teacher’s potential, she poached her, persuading Crawfie to come for a trial ‘to see if you like us and we like you’.
Even though Crawford had spent the day travelling from Scotland to Windsor, she was expected to start work on arrival:
Crawfie, with her progressive ideas, was certain she wouldn’t like them. It didn’t help that she arrived at Royal Lodge, Windsor Great Park, late at night. Since Lilibet (as they called Princess Elizabeth) had insisted on staying awake, an exhausted Crawfie, straight off the train, was obliged to stagger into the nursery. Here, a child was sitting up in bed, yanking on dressing gown cords tied to the bedposts. ‘I’m driving my horses round the park,’ she winningly explained.
It was love at first sight for them both. And so Crawfie stayed, but with caveats.
It was Crawford who showed them how the other half lived. She took the princesses on all manner of distinctly un-Royal visits:
She thought the Royal Family stuffy and wanted to bring normality and fun to her pupils’ sequestered lives. Defying court protocol, she took them on the Tube, shopping at Woolworths, swimming at public baths and even helped set up a Buckingham Palace Girl Guide group. This exposure to the ordinary has proved invaluable to the Queen.
Despite these daring things, everything went well.
Then, after Crawford’s retirement in 1947, as the princesses were old enough not to need a governess anymore, there was an intersection of the Queen (as the Duchess of York became), an American magazine, and Crawford’s husband with the governess stuck in the middle:
What became The Little Princesses seems originally to have been the Queen Mother’s idea. The then Queen Elizabeth thought it would benefit post-war relations if pieces about her eldest daughter appeared in the American press. A palace courtier was chosen to write articles and the now-retired Crawfie, who knew Princess Elizabeth better than anyone, was ordered to tell him all she knew. He, not she, would have the byline and be paid by the magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal. But Crawfie’s husband, George Buthlay, felt his wife should write her own account and sent her to Queen Elizabeth to ask permission. It was flatly refused and Crawfie prepared to shelve the project. But Buthlay had other ideas – for Crawfie to write a memoir.
It was the beginning of the end, a very painful one for Crawford, who never recovered:
Though different versions of the story have been put forward, the definitive account seems to be this: together with the Ladies’ Home Journal’s unscrupulous editors, Buthlay told his wife that Her Majesty would see the manuscript – that nothing would be published without royal approval. All lies; the book came out regardless, initially as magazine articles. The Royal Family was furious, considering it an act of treachery, and poor Crawfie was cast into the outer darkness.
She fled to Aberdeen and bought a house right on the route that the Royal Family took annually to Balmoral. But her hope that they might one day stop and forgive her proved unfounded. She became depressed and lonely – it had been too late, on retirement, to have children of her own. Crawford left a poignant note on attempting to take her own life: ‘I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road.’
That the Windsors maintained their animus until Crawfie’s death in 1988 seems extraordinary, especially as breaches of royal privacy, many self-inflicted, have been numerous since. But at the funeral of the woman who had served them so devotedly, not a single royal flower was sent.
In my opinion, be it ever so humble on matters Royal, the Queen Mother was still very much alive and well when Crawford died. From what I understand, the Queen Mother, as jovial as she appeared in public, ran the family’s private affairs with a rule of iron. I think she would have put her foot down at giving Crawford any honour at all. The Royal Family used to be like Las Vegas. What went on behind closed doors stayed there.
What I find puzzling it that, if or since The Little Princesses was published in 1950 and the Queen Mother was so cross, how was it that Crawford and her husband ended up attending a garden party at Holyrood Palace (Edinburgh) in 1952? The Tatler article has a photo of them getting into a chauffeur-driven car to the event.
Nevertheless, it appeared that the Queen had a change of mind late in life:
The material released to mark the Queen’s 94th birthday in April included a few seconds of film in which Crawfie and the princesses are dancing the Lambeth Walk.
Perhaps the scandals besetting the monarchy in recent years have given the Queen a new perspective on an old hurt. Nearly nine decades after that first meeting in the night nursery, has Her Majesty finally forgiven Crawfie?
Prince Philip
Marion Crawford was there when the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth met the man of her dreams.
Politico tells us:
In 1939, in the shadow of war, the 13-year-old princess met her Prince Charming during a visit to Dartmouth naval college.
Philip, then aged 19, was exotic Eurotrash. An exiled Greek prince who had grown up in Paris, he was estranged from his family. His three surviving sisters had married into the Nazi regime. His father was living the life of an aging playboy in Monte Carlo. His mother had been declared insane.
In Britain he found a home. In Elizabeth he found devotion.
She was smitten from the get-go:
In a letter to a cousin, she declared that she had met a “Viking God,” and for the rest of the war the two exchanged letters.
Like almost everything else in the queen’s private world, we know nothing of what they said to each other.
The Queen was less than impressed, so the princess enlisted help from elsewhere in the family:
The queen mother distrusted Philip and nicknamed him “the Hun,” but Elizabeth got her way, finding in Louis Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, a Machiavellian ally. In 1947 the couple were engaged.
That year, the princess wrote a letter, describing her feelings for her fiancé:
In a rare gushing letter to the author Betty Shew written that same year, we get a tantalizing glimpse of Elizabeth’s feelings. Over four excitable pages. Elizabeth talks about nightclubs and dancing and how they were once pursued thrillingly by a photographer through the streets of London. It’s the letter of a woman who is deeply in love.
The wedding in November 1947 was modest for post-war Britain, but it was still lavish by any standards today:
Their wedding that November was a matter of national celebration. Billed as an “austerity wedding,” it was really nothing of the sort. The union was an excuse for nationwide festivities. Thousands of people descended on London for the event. There were 2,500 presents — including a shawl woven by Gandhi and a diamond and platinum Cartier necklace from the Nizam of Hyderabad.
The war had given the royals a new raison d’etre as a “national family,” and the marriage of the beautiful young princess to the handsome young prince seemed to encapsulate fresh beginnings and a new hope of a better world to come.
Early married life
Princess Elizabeth became a naval wife for a time, but not just any naval wife:
They had two children (Charles and Anne) in quick succession and between 1949 and 1951 lived in Malta, where Philip was serving as a naval officer on HMS Chequers.
Once again, official biographies portray this era as a period of “normality.” It’s not entirely true. They lived in a six-bedroom mansion, and in addition to Bobo, had an army of staff.
More approachability
During the Queen’s reign, the Royal Family began opening up in the 1960s, not least with a multi-episode documentary which I saw when growing up in the US. My parents and I were fascinated and amused in equal parts.
Politico says it was a disaster, but I wonder if the chap who wrote the article was even alive then. The Investiture of the Prince of Wales took place around the same time, which my mother and I got up early to watch. Both programmes helped to demystify the Royals.
At the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, even though the media tried to play down the Royal Family and the Sex Pistols came out with ‘God Save the Queen’, her subjects broke out the bunting and organised street parties. The monarch sent her heartfelt thanks.
Diana and Fergie
What can one say about the wives of Charles and Andrew?
With regard to Diana, I have read in several places then and now that the Queen Mother had a hand in that marriage.
Politico says:
In 1981, the crowds turned out again, this time to watch Prince Charles marry Diana Spencer, and people turned out to wave again. From the fawning coverage, it looked like a fairy tale, but for the royal family, it was the beginning of a tragedy.
The couple had only met a dozen times and had been pushed together in near desperation, and the relationship quickly dissolved into a battle between Diana and The Firm.
The Duchess of York was no angel, but she and Prince Andrew are still together, despite their divorce.
Later jubilees
How wonderful it was to celebrate the Queen’s Golden (2002), Diamond (2012) and Platinum Jubilees (2022). Those of us alive at the time should consider ourselves blessed.
Politico points out that the Golden Jubilee was a departure from the norm. I was having dinner not far away on the night of the concert and could hear the music on the venue’s terrace. It was electric:
… the event was turned instead into a “people’s party,” complete with Brian May playing the national anthem on Buckingham Palace’s roof.
… the queen — having been the nation’s sweetheart and the nation’s mother — was reinvented as the nation’s grandmother …
Even in her teatime years, the Queen continued to surprise us:
As she advanced into her 80s, the outward image of an unsmiling monarch seemed to loosen up a bit. There was a stunt with James Bond actor Daniel Craig at the opening of the 2012 Olympics, when she appeared to jump out of a helicopter, and she made a funny viral video with her grandson Harry in the run-up to the Invictus Games in 2016.
Her Christmas Day messages became softer in tone …
And who can forget her sketch with Paddington Bear last year at the Palace?
An enduring enigma
Politico concludes that we knew the Queen, yet we didn’t know her at all. That was by design:
At the end — the life of Elizabeth remains an enigma.
We know this much about her: She was in essence a countrywoman, of a certain type familiar among the British upper classes. Dry and stiff upper lipped. Raised in singularly cosseted surroundings from which she never strayed far. She adored horses and people who loved horses, and dogs and people who loved dogs.
Interestingly, one of the last films the Queen made, in April 2022, was with her horses at Sandringham. ITV showed the footage a year ago during the Platinum Jubilee weekend. The Mail had the story, complete with photos and a short video:
The monarch, 96, described one of the horses as an ‘extraordinary girl’ and is heard to say she wonders what goes through the creature’s head.
The clips, filmed at the Royal Stud in Sandringham in April, will be shown in a special feature as part of ITV‘s Saturday Platinum Jubilee coverage …
In the clips, the monarch, wearing a black coat and with a floral headscarf wrapped around her head, observed various horses and foals, alongside her trusted bloodstock and racing adviser John Warren …
Gently stroking the coat of one of the horses, the Queen is heard to say: ‘Well it must be three or four years when she came down into Windsor yard, but behaved as though she’d always been there.’
Admiring the horse, she added: ‘Extraordinary girl, aren’t you?’
Another clip showed the Queen asking a horse ‘would you like another one?’, before picking a carrot from a bowl and feeding it.
Later, observing two horses walking alongside each other in the yard, the Queen is heard to say: ‘I often wonder what goes through her head’ …
Her Majesty’s fondness of horses began when she was just four after her grandfather, King George V, gave her a little Shetland pony.
By the age of six she had fallen in love with riding, becoming an accomplished equestrian in her teenage years and has continued to ride for pleasure throughout her life.
From her first appearance at the annual Trooping the Colour to 1986, the monarch would attend the ceremony on horseback.
She first attended the Royal Windsor Horse Show as a horse-mad teenager in 1943. Together with Princess Margaret, the 17-year-old showed off her equestrian prowess by winning the Pony & Dogcart class.
The Queen owns several thoroughbreds for racing after she initially inherited King George’s breeding and racing stock following his death in February 1952.
In 1974, the monarch’s interest in horses was the subject of a documentary title, The Queen’s Race Horses: a Private View, which she herself narrated.
Returning to Politico:
She knew a lot about the things she had inherited and not much about anything else. She drove — fast — about her estates in a beaten-up Land Rover and dedicated her life to fiercely protecting the promulgation of the family firm.
But it was almost as if she was absent from her own story — her legend as rigorously curated and spun as that of any autocrat. To provide her United Kingdom with the monarch she felt it needed, she sacrificed an ordinary life and the other things most of us take for granted. But then the curious nature of hereditary monarchy never offered her another path.
Britain will consider itself lucky to have had such a stalwart head of state. Elizabeth Windsor played the role of queen with unflinching conviction for more than 70 years. In performing the part so well, she has left a hole that might yet prove impossible to fill.
Conclusion
What can we learn from the Queen’s conduct?
Discretion, which, according to an old British saying, is the better part of valour.
Silence, in not saying more than one should.
Order, in everything: attire, appearance and daily life.
Those things coupled with a deep personal faith comprised an extraordinary person.
If we all took these aspects of the Queen’s life to heart and cultivated them, the world would be a much better place.
One year ago, we were on the cusp of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, an event that will not recur for at least a century, probably longer.
This was Tatler‘s cover to celebrate that historic British milestone:
The artist was honoured to have been asked to create the portrait:
The Commonwealth was very important to the Queen and, during her reign, she visited nearly every Parliament building in those countries:
On April 6, in a 70-photo countdown to the Platinum Jubilee, the Royal Family selected one of the Queen with the Commonwealth Heads of State from 1964. It was taken at Buckingham Palace. The Commonwealth was dear to her heart. The Mail published the photo and a report.
The picture:
showcases a dinner party at Buckingham Palace with the Queen smiling as she was joined by Commonwealth Heads of State, including Prime Minister Robert Menzies of Australia, Donald Sangster of Jamaica and Milton Obote of Uganda.
Her Majesty is Head of the Commonwealth, which has grown from 8 to 54 members in the last 70 years.
Explaining the countdown, the Royal family’s Instagram page reads: ‘Over the next 70 days, as we countdown to the #PlatinumJubilee Celebration Weekend, we’ll be sharing an image a day of The Queen – each representing a year of Her Majesty’s 70-year long reign.’
Each of the 70 photos represent a year of the monarch’s seven-decade reign, and each post also highlights a notable moment in history from the same year.
Vogue‘s Platinum Jubilee cover featured a stunning 1957 portrait of her by the late Lord Snowdon. On March 24, The Mail included the photo in their report:
Queen Elizabeth II will appear on the cover of April’s edition of British Vogue for the first time ever in celebration of her Platinum Jubilee.
The cover features a 1957 image of her Majesty, taken by Lord Snowden, the former husband of Princess Margaret. The Queen wears the George IV State Diadem in the photo, which was taken around the time of her tenth wedding anniversary to Prince Philip.
There is no woman who has had her image reproduced as often as the Queen, because she was on all our stamps (even in silhouette), coinage and bank notes, too. That is also unlikely to recur for at least a century, if not longer.
March 17, 2010 was the 50th anniversary of the Queen’s first appearance on British currency. In fact, it was the first time any British monarch’s image had appeared on a bank note, something of which I was unaware.
The Daily Mail had a short but interesting retrospective of the various bank notes and her different portraits during that time:
Kings and queens have featured on coins for centuries, but it wasn’t until March 17 1960 that a monarch’s image was printed on paper currency.
Since then there have been five different portraits of the Queen used – some of them at the same time on different denominations.
The images were produced by Robert Austin (1960), Reynolds Stone (1963), Harry Eccleston (1970 and 1971) and Roger Withington (1990).
From 1970, the Queen’s face was frozen for 20 years, with Mr Eccleston’s image gradually introduced on every note – including the reintroduced-50 in 1981.
But in 1990 Mr Withington sketched the Queen, showing her for the first time as a slightly older-looking woman.
The banknotes and the portraits are included in the free A Decoration-And A Safeguard exhibition which opens at the Bank of England Museum, in London, today.
Another historic event that took place during her lifetime was the shift to new money. This was how the old system worked:
Here is a close up of old currency from 1967:
As Politico‘s obituary of her on September 8, 2022, put it:
The queen was an icon, in the literal sense. She inspired Andy Warhol screen prints, tea towels …
“God save the queen!” the Sex Pistols sang in 1977. “She ain’t no human being!” And they made a compelling point.
A punk image of her appeared on that Sex Pistols’ album cover, too.
Even from the very beginning, Elizabeth Windsor’s image went worldwide. When she was born to the Duke and Duchess of York, as they were at the time, official portraits of mother and child were taken almost immediately. Tatler, which was then a weekly, published them straightaway.
When the Queen turned 84 in April 2010, the Palace released unseen photos of her as a toddler. On April 20 that year, The Telegraph reproduced one of the images and reported:
The photographs form part of an exhibition of the work of the photographer Marcus Adams, which opens at Windsor Castle on Saturday.
The 56 images on display include pictures of the then Princess Elizabeth which were taken to be sent to her mother and father, the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, while they were on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand.
Among the collection is a poignant letter from the Princess’s nanny, Clara Knight, which reflects how many landmarks of their young daughter’s life the then Duke and Duchess of York missed while they were on the tour.
The note, written on March 8, 1927, reads: “If Mummy looks into my wide open mouth with a little magnifying glass she will see my two teeth. Elizabeth is quite well & happy!”
Lisa Heighway, the collection’s curator, explained that, in those days, Royal children were not taken on long, official tours. They stayed at home with their nanny. However, times change, and a young Prince William joined the then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their tour of Australia.
On May 30, 2022, The Mail republished a selection of newly colourised candids of the Queen from her infancy through to young adulthood:
Newly colourised photos of the Queen as young woman have given a glimpse at Princess Elizabeth as you’ve never seen her before …
The photos have been discovered in the TopFoto archives, documenting moments throughout the Queen’s life from her birth in 1926 to 1952, just before she ascended the throne.
Another photo many readers will not have seen is this one from the 1960s:
Until 2022, the Queen distributed Maundy Money to pensioners in England every Maundy Thursday. On April 9, 2009, The Telegraph published a set of photographs from her visit that year to St Edmundsbury Cathedral, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. In case anyone was wondering:
Initially the sovereign gave money to the poor – and washed recipients’ feet. Foot-washing ended with James II in the 17th Century.
On April 8, 2022, The Mail reported that the cancellation was the first one of her reign. Sadly, it turned out to be her last as well:
The Queen has pulled out of the annual Maundy Day church service ‘with regret’, Buckingham Palace has announced.
In a first for her reign, the monarch, who turns 96 this month, will instead be represented by Prince Charles and Camilla at the event, due to be held on April 14.
The service will take place a St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle following a two-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic.
It comes after the Queen, who suffers from widely-publicised mobility issues, pulled out of the Commonwealth Service last month amid concerns over her health.
In May 2022, a few weeks before her Platinum Jubilee, the Queen’s last grand opening event was that of the eponymous Elizabeth Line, which runs from Reading, Berkshire, through London to Shenfield, Essex, with a branch line going south of the Thames to Abbey Wood.
Conservative MP Greg Hands pointed out that the Queen was surrounded by male world leaders for many years. She is shown taking a short ride on the Elizabeth Line:
On September 8, 2022, The Times posted a splendid collection of photographs from her birth on April 21, 1926 through to her final one, taken just before she met Liz Truss to ask her to form a new government on September 6, 2022.
What do we learn from the Queen’s many photographs and portraits?
Who can better explain than the award-winning art critic Waldemar Januszczak, who wrote a critique of her images for The Times on May 29, 2022, and included a variety of photos and paintings. Emphases mine below:
Think of all those history-changing individuals — Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, Marilyn Monroe. Yet, according to the National Portrait Gallery, Elizabeth II has out-portrayed every one. She is “the most portrayed individual in history.” It’s an extraordinary fact.
The reasons there are so many portraits of her are many and varied. Her longevity has obviously been crucial. As we press our lips to the trumpets and toot our 70 platinum toots most of us will have lived our lives within her reign. The Queen has bookended our existence. She has always been there …
Since she was a small girl, beaming from the cigarette cards pressed into the British fag packet by WD & HO Wills, the camera has loved the Queen. At first it was that Shirley Temple thing she had. As a child she oozed a bouncy blonde confidence. Especially when Princess Margaret was in the shot as well and Elizabeth could adopt the presence of a mildly bossy elder sister.
Yet it was in her princess years, when the cherub of the cigarette cards blossomed into the seriously beautiful heir to the throne, that things really started to heat up between the Queen and the camera. Sociologists, historians and cynics will tell you that these were already years of exponential growth in the image industry — new magazines, new cameras, a new interest in the new. As an entity, the royal family had become actively aware of the need to present a fresh image of itself to its populace. Not just in Britain, but in every corner of the huge pink empire it ruled.
It’s all true. Everybody loves a princess. But any old princess would not have emitted the powerful gamma rays that Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor emitted …
… this particular princess could have been a film star. The line of her neck. The precise bunching of her hair, carefully parted, but with a hint of noirish unruliness. The society photographer Dorothy Wilding saw it too. It was one of Wilding’s perfect royal profiles, taken immediately after the accession in 1952, that became the image repeated on our national stamps.
Later still, Andy Warhol used one of the official state likenesses of her as the basis for a brightly iconic royal screenprint. From the start, Elizabeth Windsor had something about her that lenses go giddy over.
So, yes, the camera loved the Queen. But — and this is where it gets slippery — she evidently loved it back … as a young woman, Elizabeth knew what she had and was never entirely shy about putting it out there. She could smoulder. She could do the half-smile thing. She could look back at us alluringly over a naked shoulder.
The photographer who recognised this most precisely was Cecil Beaton. It started when he was telephoned out of the blue by Buckingham Palace. At the time, the years before and after the Coronation, he was the world’s best known fashion photographer. But a fashion photographer is not a royal photographer. Hiring him was an independent and pointed thing for the Queen to do.
With his rococo details, cascading cloths and bountiful bouquets, Beaton gave the postwar world the fairytale princess it desired. When she became Queen the regalia changed, but not the mood. For him she was always a monarch of the Cinderella dynasty. What Beaton knew from the start, with his fashion training, is that a supermodel had ascended to the British throne.
I have met her only once, while making a film about the art in the Royal Collection. Invited for tea at Buckingham Palace, I was struck by her complexion. She was in her seventies, but her face was as smooth as a piece of Meissen porcelain. Her eyes — butterfly blue at the centre, snow white at the edges — still looked new, as if they had just come out of a Harrods box.
Unfortunately, most of the Queen’s painted portraits were quite dismal:
Most of the painters she has turned to have come from that bleak institution: the Establishment School of Untalented Lackeys. The results have been bad likenesses or very uninteresting ones. The fashionable Italian Pietro Annigoni had perhaps the best go in 1955 when he painted the recently crowned monarch in a traditional manner — the post, post, post-Renaissance style. The results were close enough to one of Beaton’s royal photographs to remain charming. Just.
Annigoni’s is my favourite. Warhol’s is my next favourite. Both are in the article.
Januszczak surmises that the Palace wanted to downplay the Queen’s regal aura by commissioning less-than-stellar portrait artists:
What happened, I think, is that the confidence and charisma of the princess years were brushed aside by a Palace strategy that demanded a more humble, less privileged royal portraiture. In an effort to ingratiate themselves with the Joneses, the Windsors began to downplay their aristocracy.
I could not agree more, and it is a shame. The Queen deserved far better, which makes the portraits of her youth so enticing. We want to go back to them all the more. Their beauty and composition draw us in. Can we look at them only once? No. We return for a second and a third look.
More on the Queen to follow tomorrow. How I wish she were still alive.
It was by sheer coincidence that yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, I happened to be writing about 1 Timothy 6:3-5, a passage that gives the characteristics of false teachers, and then ran across a profile of a former vicar.
Those verses are worth reading before proceeding with the following post.
It is unfortunate that the ex-vicar in question is the Revd Richard Coles, famous in Britain for being on nearly every reality television series going.
It is unfortunate because his on-screen persona is exactly what one would want in a vicar: joviality, warmth and humour. No doubt many Britons empathised when his civil partner David, also a Church of England priest, died a week before Christmas in 2019.
In July 2020, Coles, who was straddling his responsibilities as a vicar with television engagements, defended the Church over slavery. This was a month after George Floyd protests had taken place during lockdown — no problem there, as we saw — and discussions continued from henceforth.
On July 2 that year, The Express reported:
Reverend Richard Coles was shut down by African Studies Professor Kehinde Andrews who explained the Anglo-Church paid some of the largest compensation after the end of the slave trade. The pair clashed in a heated debate over the portrayal of Jesus. It comes as the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has called for reconsideration of Jesus being perceived as a white man.
Speaking on GMB [ITV’s Good Morning Britain], Reverend Richard Coles said: “The Church has also played a prophetic part in seeking equality for black people around the world.
“The Church of England in the 18th and 19th centuries played a significant role in the legislation to bring about the abolition of the slave trade.
“The Church of England played a very important part.”
However, the professor was unhappy and cited Isaiah 1:18:
“The image of the white Jesus was given to us as the enslaved.
“It was taken to African schools and put on to us in one of the main ways to pacify us.
“You still have people in Black churches in this country saying that ‘he will wash you white as snow’.
“That’s the original white saviour image and the whole purpose of it was to embed colonialism and slavery …”
This is the problem with taking anything, including the Bible, out of context. The Lord was referring to scarlet sins.
Here is an excerpt from Isaiah 1 (emphases mine):
15 When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.
Your hands are full of blood!
16 Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
17 Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.[a]
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.
18 “Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the Lord.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.
19 If you are willing and obedient,
you will eat the good things of the land;
20 but if you resist and rebel,
you will be devoured by the sword.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
In 2022, Coles made a one-off documentary for Channel 4, Good Grief, which aired on August 8. By then, he had just retired as a vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire in the East Midlands and had moved to a seaside village in Sussex, on the south coast.
The day before the programme aired, Coles told The Telegraph of the anger he felt when his alcoholic partner, the priest, died. We also got a synopsis of the show. Note that there is no mention of Scripture:
In the show, we see him searching for new ways to process his sense of loss, immersing himself in a plethora of grief therapies.
He throws himself into skydiving, boxing and surfing to escape his thoughts and tries yoga laughter to “act” his way out of pain; he gathers with others for a grief “supper club” and, perhaps most movingly, a grief cruise in Miami …
Researching the film reminded Richard that there are, of course, no quick fixes to the outrageous pain of grief. “You won’t find something that will magically make you feel better. But there are things which can help you connect to the part of yourself that’s most vulnerable, and I found this helpful. Boxing, especially, was my favourite.”
This might surprise his fans, who know him as an erudite, witty man more at home on the Strictly dance floor, rather than sweating in a gym. He laughs when I suggest this.
“Boxing licensed my anger. As a vicar, you swallow your own feelings to help other people manage theirs. Boxing was a way of legitimising the pointless fury of grief.” The more physical activities also helped him push back against the sense of life becoming diminished and made smaller, which grief brings with it. “Grief can make you feel irrational anger towards the dead person for having wrecked your life, which is perhaps why grief, guilt and anger often go around as a trio. Boxing allowed me to feel everything, which was helpful.”
There was also an element of catharsis at work, because Richard is honest about how angry he felt over David’s continued drinking. “At its worst, his addiction was very bad, and I think I knew, at a deep level, that it could only end with his death,” he confides. “And I felt furious with him for drinking like that, and also guilty for feeling furious. But when it was especially bad, I’d arrive home and sit in the drive thinking, what fresh hell awaits me inside?”
Coles has a famous friend in Northamptonshire, Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother:
He tells me about spending the Christmas following David’s death with his friend, Charles [9th Earl Spencer and younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales]. “And we ended up at Diana’s grave, the most mourned person in my entire life, so yes, we would all see the dark comedy in that.”
Coles retains his house in Northamptonshire.
He rightly pointed out that we no longer know how to cope with death. He also rightly brought up his Christian beliefs:
It’s interesting to hear Richard wrestling with the transcendent power of his own faith in relation to his very human and earthly longing to see David again. “Because I am a Christian and believe in the power of the Gospel, I live in hope of something that awaits beyond the horizon of death. But while the thought of David enduring is wonderful, all I really want today is for him to walk in through the door again.”
However, all I could think of was that Coles would have done better to immerse himself in the epistles at his time of grief, Paul’s, in particular. We are all bound to suffer to some degree in this life. As we know, the death of a loved one affects us all. When we are mourning and calling upon Christ to comfort us, we are also called to use that as a means of sanctification.
In my post on 1 Timothy 6:3-5, I cited John MacArthur’s sermon on those verses. MacArthur spoke of the importance of knowing and understanding the Bible:
If false teaching is contrary to Scripture, it is easily recognized by one who knows what Scripture teaches, one who, in the terms of 1 John 2, has become a spiritual young man, because the Word of God abides in you and you are strong and therefore you have overcome the wicked one. The wicked one plying his false teaching is overcome by one who is strong in the Word …
That’s why the primary task of the shepherd is to feed the sheep, so that they begin to recognize what is their proper diet, and they don’t go out to eat the noxious deadly weeds that grow on the fringes of their pasture …
When you know good doctrine and your people know good doctrine, you’re protected. You’re protected from the deadly virus of error. And the only protecting antibiotic that we have against false teaching is the truth – the truth of God.
Yoga isn’t going to cure our inner pain as a mourner. Neither is boxing, although there will be some need to release tension and, for some, boxing fulfils the brief. Yet, the most important element of mourning is keeping an eye on Christ and His infinite grace. Our grief, in some measure, shall pass with time.
On May 28, 2023, on the feast of Pentecost, The Sunday Times Magazine published Decca Aitkenhead’s interview with the celebrity ex-vicar, ‘Richard Coles: “I met my new boyfriend on EliteSingles”‘.
I was stunned to read of the amount of anger that this man of the cloth had had since his youth. Couple that with greed as well as the love of fame, and it’s an unholy mix. It seems apposite that he is now retired from the pulpit. Good grief.
Consider Paul’s verses, then contemplate the following anecdotes.
His fury and materialism began during his schooldays, something he is writing about in his third novel involving a protagonist named Daniel:
Coles’s own father was a wealthy shoe manufacturer who similarly went broke while Coles was a teenager at a prestigious boarding school. It was “an excoriating experience, a life-changing experience” — the emotional legacy of which, he agrees, is betrayed in Daniel’s mother.
“At school everyone judged their fathers by the car they drove. And woe betide the person who once turned up in a Rolls-Royce and next turned up in a Ford Granada.” The memory still haunts him. “Status,” he murmurs reverently. “Prestige.” He has a friend whose father also lost everything while he was at boarding school, and is one of the most driven people he knows. “We both think some iron entered our souls at that point when we were teenagers and we lost prestige because our parents lost wealth. Yeah, that was really formative.”
His relationship with money is “hugely” loaded. “I’ve always disguised it from myself and told myself I’m committed to antimaterialistic doctrines and Christianity. But you know what? I’ve always been able to make a buck. And I have always been scared of poverty.”
He recently told his accountant he was frightened that he would end up living on the street, destitute. The astonished accountant assured him that was not going to happen. “Well, you say that,” Coles retorted, implacably unconvinced.
Years ago, Coles lied about being HIV-positive. It is unclear why he did so:
I’m still trying to work out how someone so honest about himself could ever have told his closest friends a total lie about being HIV positive. “It was an awful thing to do.” He shudders. “Even talking about it now, I’m ashamed of it. It’s there on the record, for ever, and it makes me feel very bad. But I am that person.”
At the end of the interview, Aitkenhead cornered him on his love of prestige and lying:
Years ago, in the course of research for an article about a pair of fraudsters, I read a lot of books about liars. One consistent theme, I begin to say — “I think I can guess what it is,” he interrupts. “Was it loss of prestige in their teenage years?” It was indeed.
“That makes perfect sense to me.” He nods. “Perfect sense.”
Dear, oh dear.
Even his friendship with Earl Spencer seems to have lost a bit of its glow, only because the two know each other so well now:
In his former parish Coles used to spend a good deal of time at nearby Althorp House, the home of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother. It feels unlikely, I suggest, that anyone could accidentally have made so many famous friends.
“I suppose what I would have said in the past is, ‘Oh, it just sort of happened that way because that’s the world I live in, dah dah dah.’ But it’s because I seek them out. And find, in their company and society, something that affirms me.” To restore his own lost prestige? He thinks for a moment. “Maybe if I’m in their golden glow, I’ll be a bit safer.” He pauses again. “But what happens of course is that it only lasts for a bit. There’s a dazzle. And then after that, if a friendship with someone comes out of it, then you’re just two people, right?”
Let’s return to anger and add lust to the mix.
This is what happened after his father’s financial failure:
In the early Eighties Coles was an angry young man on the dole in King’s Cross, fresh out of a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt at 17, and full of fury about homophobia and Margaret Thatcher.
Then he made a name for himself in popular music:
He joined a radical gay activist theatrical troupe and made friends with the Bronski Beat singer Jimmy Somerville. Together they formed the Communards in 1985 and became huge pop stars practically overnight.
Enter anger and the lie about being HIV-positive:
Yet Coles couldn’t enjoy all the fun and five-star hotels and first-class flights because he was always furious with Somerville for getting more attention than him.
Perhaps Somerville had the more winsome personality.
Anyway:
During one of their many blazing rows, in a fit of jealous pique Coles screamed that he had just been diagnosed with HIV. The upper hand and dark glamour this lie conferred was so gratifying, he repeated it to all his closest friends and couldn’t bring himself to come clean for five years. Most of his friends were extraordinarily forgiving — “That took something to admit, doll,” was all Somerville said — but one was so upset he didn’t speak to Coles for a year.
While he kept the lie alive:
the Communards had long since split, undone by mutual loathing — although they later made up and remain on friendly terms — and Coles had survived an epic two-year bender on Ecstasy, cocaine and speed.
Then came Christianity:
What had begun as high-spirited hedonism descended into wretched self-destruction and squalor, but after coming to his senses in his late twenties and cleaning up, to his surprise he found God.
Then came theology studies — and more fame:
By the early Nineties he was a theology student, a Sony award-winning BBC radio presenter and a big hit in celebrity media social circles.
When he had finished studying theology:
On graduation he moved back to his home county of Northamptonshire, where he took up dogging. He thinks that having roadside sex with random strangers was “actually rather good for me”, remedying his lifelong sense of undesirability. “But I think also I was unkind to people sometimes, so absorbed in my own gratification.”
At that point, the first half of St Paul’s 1 Timothy 6:4 came alive:
4 he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.
Then came seminary:
The dogging had stopped by the time he began training for the clergy, and in 2005 he was ordained.
I am sure that John MacArthur’s Masters Seminary would have despatched Coles quickly for reasons various.
Then came his parish work, partner and more television:
Two years later, by then a vicar in Norfolk, he fell in love with a fellow clergyman from a neighbouring parish, David, and their relationship was formalised with a civil partnership in 2010. The following year Coles moved to a Northamptonshire parish, began presenting Saturday Live and became Britain’s favourite vicar. The jovial dog-collared doyen of light entertainment has appeared on everything from Celebrity MasterChef to Celebrity Mastermind, The Weakest Link to Strictly Come Dancing, and the tragedy of David’s death from alcoholism in 2019, at just 43, shocked the nation.
Coles feels no regrets about breaking his ordination vow of celibacy in light of the nature of his sexual relationship:
He doesn’t feel the least bit guilty about breaking the same-sex celibacy oath CofE rules obliged him to take. “It’s true, bang to rights, I was dishonest. I don’t like breaking an oath, but if it is one that is unholy then I don’t feel the moral obligation to observe it.” To honour an oath that he “thought was unjust and inhuman and degrading”, he adds, “ would be much worse”.
All of that made me think of 1 Timothy 6:3 …
3 If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound[a] words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness,
… and the end of verse 5:
imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
Aitkenhead, herself an atheist, found that aspects of Coles’s life didn’t sit well with her:
… most of all I’m intrigued by his conversion from brittle pop diva to humble cleric — chiefly because it has always struck me as fishy. In my experience, fame-hungry, troubled young pop stars do not grow up to be self-effacing saints. The disarming surprise is how cheerfully he agrees.
“Yes, I don’t actually believe that finding God can fundamentally rewire most of that.” The young Coles who used to storm out of Communards interviews because all the questions had been directed at Somerville is, he chuckles, the person he remains to this day. So why has everyone mistaken him for a sweetie? “Because I’ve offered them that version of me.” With a soft groan, he despairs, “Why do I do it? Sometimes I could drown in a sea of my own whimsy.”
It is a good thing that he has retired.
He admits to his former parishoners having the same impression as Aitkenhead:
I wonder if his celebrity circles made any parishioners suspicious of him. “I’m sure it did.” Of the only two arguments he had with them, one was sparked when someone made a snide swipe about “you and your fancy friends”. He looks embarrassed. “And I snapped. I lost my temper. And why do I lose my temper? Because I’m called out on something.”
A similar disagreement occurred with his late partner:
He had a whopping row with his late husband when he was voted off Strictly and pretended not to mind. “And David knew that I really minded, he wasn’t buying it, and we had a big fight. I lost my temper. And then I felt stupid.” The honest truth, he admits, is he had secretly thought he might win.
That is the Coles story up to this point.
More verses from 1 Timothy have come to mind over the past few hours.
In 1 Timothy 1:3-7, Paul introduced his discussion on false teachers, including this assertion of truth:
5 The aim of our charge [command] is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.
Then there are the verses from 1 Timothy 3:1-7 (continued here and here) about the characteristics of a good overseer — a pastor or vicar:
3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer[a] must be above reproach, the husband of one wife,[b] sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
St Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, knew what he was talking about. The Church would be restored if only more of today’s seminaries followed his instructions to Timothy.
The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.
Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.
Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
False Teachers and True Contentment
3 If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound[a] words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, 4 he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, 5 and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
——————————————————————————————————————–
Last week’s post discussed Paul’s instructions to Timothy about being a good employee. If you haven’t read it, it is truly a message to be shared with others, especially young people who do not like to work, something of a phenomenon in British society these days.
The second half of verse 2 appears in some versions, e.g. the ESVUK, connected with this section. Here it is:
Teach and urge these things.
John MacArthur explains why that is (emphases mine):
Go back to verse 2 at the end, “These things teach and exhort,” says Paul in ending verse 2. And what things does he have in mind? Everything that he has brought up in this epistle. It’s got to go back even beyond verses 1 and 2 which has to do with employment responsibility, to encompass the whole epistle. And that started in chapter 1 with a proper understanding of the law of God, with a proper understanding of the gospel, the saving gospel, with a proper understanding of the majesty of God in verse 17. It goes back to chapter 2 where Paul instructed about evangelistic praying, praying for the lost. It goes back to chapter 2 verses 9 to 15, the instruction on the role of a woman in the order of the church; chapter 3, principles to characterize church leaders and church deacons; chapter 4, you have there statements regarding false doctrine, and then you have the model of an effective ministry given, principles for proper ministry. Chapter 5 deals with how to treat older men and how to treat older women, particularly widows. And then how to treat younger widows. And then it discusses also how to treat the elders of the church. Then you come to chapter 6 and the matter of employment and how one is to work under both a believing and unbelieving boss.
And what Paul is saying at the end of verse 2 is all these things are to be taught and given by way of admonition and exhortation. In other words, teach the truth, teach the revealed truth of God in all these dimensions.
Paul says that there are those who teach a different doctrine and disagree with the sound — healthy — words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness (verse 3).
Paul begins that verse with ‘If’, and MacArthur gives us the construction in the original Greek:
he says in verse 3, “If anyone teaches differently” – differently than revelation, differently than what has been revealed through the inspiration of the Spirit of God in Scripture.
Now by the way, the ‘if’ here is a first‑class conditional in Greek, and that means that it assumes reality. If and it is true – if and it is true – could be translated “since.” Since some are teaching differently – it’s assumed that this is a reality. And it was a reality. Already from studying 1 Timothy we know that men had infiltrated the church teaching bizarre fables, endless genealogies, teaching questions rather than things that edified, vain jangling. They were desiring to be teachers of the law but didn’t know what they were talking about. They were shipwrecking the faith. They were teaching doctrines of demons spawned by seducing spirits. They were lying in hypocrisy. They were teaching areas of abstinence which were contrary to God’s truth. They were teaching knowledge falsely so called vain, profane babblings. False teaching was there.
And so when he says, “If anyone teach otherwise,” he is saying, “And I know they are.” That’s why he uses the construction of a first-class conditional. There is no specific teacher mentioned; there is no specific teaching, so we can say it’s a generic phrase. It’s a generic statement embracing all false teaching, all subversive doctrines, all subversive agents of Satan who have infiltrated the church to infect people … with the deadly virus of lying, false teaching. So it is generic enough not only to relate to everything Timothy would face but to relate to everything the church would face in any age, including today.
Matthew Henry’s commentary succinctly explains Christian doctrine:
Observe, The doctrine of our Lord Jesus is a doctrine according to godliness; it has a direct tendency to make people godly.
MacArthur tells us what is ungodly:
Paul is saying, “Look, if anyone teaches differently, that’s the mark.” That’s how you know them. It is, first of all then, what they affirm. You have to listen to what they say. Is it different than what you know Scripture says? Are they saying something different? The word is heterodidaskalei, a heterodox teaching rather than an orthodox teaching. That means a heresy, a false teaching, something that is different than the Scripture teaches. They don’t get their teaching out of the Word of God. They have something different than the Bible, some vision, some revelation, some psychological insight, some self-generated, self-spawned doctrine, some interpretation that is contrary to Scripture. Anything different than the sound true teaching of the Word of God revealed – marks a false teacher. It could be a teaching that denies that God is the only true God. It could be a teaching that denies that God is a spirit and turns God into an idol or a man. It could be a teaching that denies that God is a trinity or that denies some of the attributes or any of the attributes of God. It could be a teaching that denies that God is almighty, that God is sovereign, that God is the creator, that God has revealed Himself in history. It can be a teaching that denies His person, His attributes, or His works. And any such thing marks out one who has a virus that is deadly.
It could be error about Christ, error about His lineage, error about His virgin birth. Someone who teaches contrary to the sinless perfection of Christ, contrary to His substitutionary atoning death on the cross, contrary to His resurrection, contrary to His miraculous life and works, His perfect teaching, His Second Coming, His high priestly ministry of intercession, His eternal reign, any of that. Anyone who teaches differently than that. It could be a denial of the authenticity of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture. It could be a denial of the work and ministry and person of the Holy Spirit as revealed on the pages of holy Scripture. Any deviation from what the Bible teaches marks out the virus of false teaching that can in a deadly way infect people. Any area of truth twisted, perverted, or superseding Scripture is cause for us to take note.
The person teaching a false doctrine is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing; he has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander and evil suspicions (verse 4).
Henry explains:
… he that does not consent to the words of Christ is proud (v. 4) and contentious, ignorant, and does a great deal of mischief to the church, knowing nothing. Observe, Commonly those are most proud who know least; for with all their knowledge they do not know themselves.—But doting about questions. Those who fall off from the plain practical doctrines of Christianity fall in with controversies, which eat out the life and power of religion; they dote about questions and strifes of words, which do a great deal of mischief in the church, are the occasion of envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings. When men are not content with the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the doctrine which is according to godliness, but will frame notions of their own and impose them, and that too in their own words, which man’s wisdom teaches, and not in the words which the Holy Ghost teaches ( 1 Cor 2 13), they sow the seeds of all mischief in the church.
This is why it is so important to truly understand Scripture.
MacArthur says:
If false teaching is contrary to Scripture, it is easily recognized by one who knows what Scripture teaches, one who, in the terms of 1 John 2, has become a spiritual young man, because the Word of God abides in you and you are strong and therefore you have overcome the wicked one. The wicked one plying his false teaching is overcome by one who is strong in the Word …
That’s why the primary task of the shepherd is to feed the sheep, so that they begin to recognize what is their proper diet, and they don’t go out to eat the noxious deadly weeds that grow on the fringes of their pasture …
When you know good doctrine and your people know good doctrine, you’re protected. You’re protected from the deadly virus of error. And the only protecting antibiotic that we have against false teaching is the truth – the truth of God.
It is so sad that so few denominations do focus on the Bible these days, because those sheep are easily led astray. And Satan is cunning in his ways to work through his human agents in the Church.
MacArthur has more on the words about false teachers that Paul uses:
They affirm something different than Scripture, and they are not willing to consent to healthy words, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s a present tense. The false teacher is not presently in agreement with – the idea here is in their teaching they disagree with Scripture. They’re not in agreement with healthy words. That word in the Greek becomes the English word hygiene. They don’t give themselves to the hygienic words, the healthy words, the wholesome words, the beneficial words that are namely the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.
… the words of our Lord Jesus Christ – really in the literature the Greek says, “The ones of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, they do not commit themselves to the wholesome life-giving beneficial spiritually productive words that have come to us from our Lord Jesus Christ. And that does not simply refer to the very quotes of Jesus in the gospels but all the word that He has given to us as the author of Scripture using the Spirit of God in inspiration through the human writers. The words of our Lord Jesus Christ refers to any revelation given to us and particularly – most particularly – the New Testament revelation.
There is a danger with clerics who are not committed to the teachings of the Bible:
False teachers will be all over the place. They may talk about Jesus. They may talk about God. But the heart of their ministry will not be the Word of God. They add to that and they take away from that. And so they affirm things different than Scripture and they do not consent to what is in the Scripture. And you can mark them out. The Scripture is the beginning and the ending of God’s revelation, and all that we are to teach is contained within its pages …
The ultimate test of truth is resulting godliness. They do not agree with the teaching which is related to godliness. Truth always results in godliness when it is applied. The Word of God will produce healthy spiritual behavior. The Word of God will bring truth to bear on a life that results in godliness. That’s why 4:7 of 1 Timothy says, “Exercise yourself unto godliness” – exercise yourself unto godliness.
Now listen, error can never produce godliness. What do we mean by godliness? Reverence, piety, but simply to be like God, to be like Christ. False teaching, heresy, error cannot produce Christ-likeness. Only the truth of God can do that. Only the Word can produce godliness. Living holiness, living reverence, living God-likeness, living Christ-likeness is the fruit of truth. So the ultimate test of a teacher’s teaching is to take a look at his or her life.
… Take a look at their conduct. Do they take pleasure in wickedness, as Peter says they do? Are they given over to presumptuous self-willed lewdness as Peter also says, 2 Peter 2, in so many words? Are they given over to sinful life? Are the oriented to pride? When you see them do you see them concerned with prestige and recognition and power and popularity? And is there a certain sexual looseness in their behavior? Are they self‑centered, self‑indulgent, self‑gratifying? If so, those are the things not produced by truth but produced by lies.
Look at their creed. Listen to what they say. Are they calling for repentance? Are they calling for holiness? Are they calling for God-likeness and Christ-likeness? Are they telling people to abandon their self-indulgence? Are they calling for brokenness over sin? Or are they teaching teachings that accommodate the carnal mind and feed the fallenness of man? That’s the question. And so when you look to the identifying marks in the pathology of false teachers, first of all they say things different than Scripture. Secondly, they deny things the Scripture says. And thirdly, what they teach does not produce godliness. That’s how you mark them …
I remember a professor who is well known to my family in a seminary, a very well-known seminary, who got into these kinds of speculations and these kinds of word games and became so totally frustrated that he went into an apartment one night, shut the windows, turned the gas on and gassed himself. Clouds with no water – raging seas foaming out nothing but shame – wandering stars. Their minds know nothing, and they engage themselves in useless speculations about words that only start battles, logomachias, semantic battles.
MacArthur explains what ‘puffed up’ means in Greek:
Verse 4, the first statement is simple, “He is” – what? – “proud.” What’s their attitude? Pride. Their mark is heresy and their attitude is pride. It’s the same word used in chapter 3 verse 6. It’s a very unique word. It’s the word tuphoō, which means to be enveloped in smoke or engulfed in smoke. It’s a perfect passive form, which means they’re in a settled state of being engulfed in their own smoke. In other words, they’re just pure smoke. They’re just a big puff of hot air. Arrogance is what that word implies. They are arrogant. False teachers inevitably are arrogant.
Such people engage in and encourage conflict — constant friction — among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain (verse 5), meaning making money.
Henry says:
We observe, 1. The words of our Lord Jesus Christ are wholesome words, they are the fittest to prevent or heal the church’s wounds, as well as to heal a wounded conscience; for Christ has the tongue of the learned, to speak a word in season to him that is weary, Isa 50 4. The words of Christ are the best to prevent ruptures in the church; for none who profess faith in him will dispute the aptness or authority of his words who is their Lord and teacher, and it has never gone well with the church since the words of men have claimed a regard equal to his words, and in some cases a much greater. 2. Whoever teaches otherwise, and does not consent to these wholesome words, he is proud, knowing nothing; for pride and ignorance commonly go together. 3. Paul sets a brand only on those who consent not to the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the doctrine which is according to godliness; they are proud, knowing nothing: other words more wholesome he knew not. 4. We learn the sad effects of doting about questions and strifes of words; of such doting about questions comes envy, strife, evil surmisings, and perverse disputings; when men leave the wholesome words of our Lord Jesus Christ, they will never agree in other words, either of their own or other men’s invention, but will perpetually wrangle and quarrel about them; and this will produce envy, when they see the words of others preferred to those they have adopted for their own; and this will be attended with jealousies and suspicions of one another, called here evil surmisings; then they will proceed to perverse disputings. 5. Such persons as are given to perverse disputings appear to be men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth; especially such as act in this manner for the sake of gain, which is all their godliness, supposing gain to be godliness, contrary to the apostle‘s judgment, who reckoned godliness great gain. 6. Good ministers and Christians will withdraw themselves from such. “Come out from among them, my people, and be ye separate,” says the Lord: from such withdraw thyself.
MacArthur cautions us to be wary of clerics who boast of multiple academic degrees or their new truth or revelation:
I don’t care how many PhD’s or how much training or preparation they have, they know nothing. It doesn’t say they don’t know much. It says they don’t know anything. They are pompous ignoramuses. They don’t know anything, but they are inflated about what they think they know. They parade their imagined intelligence, their imagined scholarship, their imagined superior understanding, their imagined deeper insights, their imagined religious acumen, and the truth is they don’t know anything. They’re fools. First Corinthians chapter 1 and 2, they are absolute fools. And the wisdom of the world, he says, is – what? – foolishness with God. They don’t have insight into any matter of spiritual truth.
They have the wisdom, of James, that is not from above, that is earthly, sensual, demoniacal. They don’t have any truth. People who come along, whether they’re liberal theologians or cultic leaders, like Brigham Young and Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy and Judge Rutherford and whoever else they are, whether they’re L. Ron Hubbard or whoever they are, they come along and espouse some great truth, and the fact of it is they’re absolutely ignorant. They know nothing, absolutely nothing. Because you can’t know anything apart from the revelation of God. That is anything about spiritual reality. They claim some new truth, some new insight. They claim to know things that no one else knows, and they pontificate in their pompous ignorance about all the solutions to everything, and they don’t know anything.
Beloved, it’s so wonderful that the Lord has chosen to hide these things from the “wise and the prudent” – in their own eyes – and reveal them unto babes. God has hidden these things from the prosperous, self-promoting minds of this world and given it to the common folks like us. Those of us who know the Word of God know far more than the most erudite educated people who deny it.
Another thing to be wary of is the authorship of books of the Bible, a very big thing. Look at any Wikipedia entry on canonical books and you will find a running controversy on authorship in many cases:
And it isn’t enough to accept the Bible, you take the first five books of the Bible and the Scripture says they were written by Moses and along come the critics and say, “Now wait a minute, we can’t have those books written by Moses. We have a better solution.” And they invented what was called the documentary hypothesis – words, words – the documentary hypothesis. You say what is the documentary hypothesis? That means Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch. Who did? JEP&D. Who are JEP&D? Every time you see Jehovah, that’s the J writer; every time you see Elohim, that’s the E writer; every time you see a priestly passage that’s the P writer; and Deuteronomy was written by the Deuteronomists. And these are unknown people who much later than the Bible claims got a whole lot of documents and did their little thing and mish-mashed it all together, and a bunch of redactors and editors came along and changed this and changed that and fixed this and fixed that. And that’s how we got the Bible.
And you say, where does it say that? Oh, it doesn’t say that. Well, then when the Bible claims that a certain person wrote the book, is that the truth? No, no, that’s not the truth. So we deny the Scripture. We postulate the documentary hypothesis. We have all these people trying to figure out how JEP&D could do all this, especially when you have JEP&D in the same verse. Are they just passing the quill back and forth?
You come into the New Testament, and then you’ve got people who want to deny the authorship of the epistles. I can take you book after book after book, on introduction to the New Testament, where the whole approach to the author is to deny that Paul wrote the Pauline books, James wrote his epistle, deny Peter wrote his and all the way through – deny, deny, deny and postulate some – some speculative issue that they themselves have developed. This is typical. You can go back to allegorism, where they were making things in the Bible mean mystical things that they didn’t mean at all. For example, the old rabbis used to say that in the name Abraham, you give numerical equivalence to the consonants and they add up to 318. And every time you see the word Abraham that means that he had 318 servants. That’s bizarre, absolutely bizarre. And that kind of stuff goes on and on.
MacArthur has more on the characteristics of false teachers:
The mark then? Heresy. The attitude? Pride. The mentality? Ignorance. The effects? Chaos. Number five, just briefly, the cause of false teachers. Now I don’t mean by that the supernatural cause, the Satanic or demonic cause, I mean the source within them. Look at verse 5 again, “These perverse disputings come from men of corrupt minds.” There’s your basic cause. What you have is an unregenerate mind. You have a mind that’s never been transformed. You have the mind that is at enmity with God; that Paul calls, in Romans 8 the, carnal mind is at enmity with God. It’s an enemy of God. It is that earthly wisdom James refers to that fights against God. Corrupt minds. Romans 1:28, Paul says a reprobate mind, given over to every evil thing. Their mental faculties no longer function normally in the moral or spiritual realm. They do not react normally to truth. They are natural men, 1 Corinthians 2:14, who cannot understand the things of God.
So the pathological source of their disease is a corrupt mind. The deadly virus of ignorant words comes out of an abnormal mind. They don’t understand God. They don’t understand truth. They can’t understand truth. Their minds are darkened, Ephesians 4 says. Their minds are alienated from God, Ephesians 4 says. Their minds are totally wicked. It says in Colossians 1:21, your mind is basically attached to wicked works.
So alienated minds, wicked minds, darkened minds, carnal minds, corrupt minds, that’s the source. They’ve never been transformed. They have not received what I love Colossians – or 1 Corinthians 2:16 says, “But you have received the mind of” – whom? – “of Christ.” They don’t have that mind. They don’t have that mind. They don’t have the renewed mind that Paul writes about. And that’s the source. You’re dealing with a corrupt mind. You’re dealing with a regenerate mind. They may have degrees coming out their ears. They may have religious involvement. They may be a part of a cult or an -ism or whatever it is but their mind is corrupt. And out of a corrupt mind come ignorant words. That’s the cause.
Number six, the condition of false teachers. What is the present pervasive condition? Verse 5 again, he says not only are they men of corrupt minds, but, “and destitute of the truth” – and destitute of the truth. This is their condition. Their present condition is they are bereft. The word destitute means – it comes from a verb that means to steal, rob, deprive. They have been deprived of the truth, or it could be a middle voice – they have deprived themselves of the truth. They have robbed themselves of the truth, or they have been robbed of the truth.
That is a very dangerous spiritual condition, because it can — and does — lead to apostasy, which can lead to eternal condemnation in the next life:
… they moved away from the truth on their own volition. It’s not saying they were ever saved. They had a Bible. They read the Bible. They knew the truth but they moved away from it. On the other hand, it could be a passive – someone took it away. Maybe they came under the influence of someone who pulled them away from it. We might warn folks to be careful who you listen to and what you read so that you’re not a victim of that.
These are people who once were in proximity to the truth. They once had contact with the truth, maybe nothing more than having the Word of God in hand – and that’s enough, having a Bible – but now they have been deprived of it, or they have deprived themselves of it. They have literally fallen into Hebrews 6, Hebrews 10, those who were once enlightened and now have abandoned that which they once knew. They have seen and known and now rejected. And so we say their condition is apostasy. Their condition is apostasy. Their effect is chaos. Their condition is apostasy. They have departed from the faith. Who have they been listening to? The father of all lies, John 8:44, Satan himself. They have departed from the truth. They have deviated from the truth. As it says in 2 Timothy 2:18, they have erred concerning the truth. They are “ever learning,” chapter 3 verse 7 of 2 Timothy, “but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” It says in the next verse, “They resist the truth because they are men of corrupt minds” – here it is – “reprobate concerning the faith.” Corrupt minds, destitute of truth, reprobate concerning the faith, it all goes together. It all goes together. Their condition is one of apostasy. They have deviated from the truth.
MacArthur ends with a seventh characteristic of false teachers:
Seventh, what’s the prognosis of false teachers? What is their prognosis? This is implied in the statement “destitute of the truth,” and their prognosis is judgment. Anyone who is utterly devoid of truth, anyone who is bereft of truth is headed for judgment. In fact, in Hebrews 6 if you turn away from the truth, there’s no hope of ever coming back to salvation. In Hebrews chapter 10, if you trample under your feet the blood of the covenant, you are headed for a disastrous and eternal judgment. Peter says in 2 Peter 2 again, they bring on themselves swift destruction. He says their destruction shall not sleep, their judgment from long ago is not idle. And then he gives illustrations by saying, verse 4, if God didn’t spare the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell, and if God didn’t spare the old world before Noah but destroyed that world of the ungodly, and if God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah turning them into ashes, if God did all of that to those apostates, then you can expect He’ll do the same to these. And so he goes on then describing these apostates and what God is going to do to them.
Jude in his little epistle gets very direct. He says they are “of old,” verse 4, “ordained to condemnation.” And then he says about them in verse 15 that God is going to come, “And convict all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” Judgment. The prognosis of false teachers is judgment, eternal hell, and the severest hell of all because they, having seen the truth, touched the truth, apostatized from it.
MacArthur concludes:
Do you know – are you aware – can you see with your two eyes the religious charlatans are a steady parade across your eyes in this society who are in it for the money? They’re everywhere – everywhere …
Let me review it very briefly, listen carefully. Stay away from people who teach contrary to Scripture. Stay away from those who deny the truth. Stay away from those who are not Christlike and godly in conduct. Stay away from and don’t listen to those attitude is arrogant, who are totally ignorant of the spiritual reality and truth and constantly theorize about useless speculation which generates word battles leading only to chaos, confusion, disorder, and disunity. Stay away from and don’t listen to those who spin their arrogant teaching out of corrupt minds which have forsaken the truth and are headed for eternal judgment. Stay clear of those who are desirous of personal enrichment at your expense … They’re infected. And the prognosis for them and those they infect is very, very sad.
This seems an apposite passage for Pentecost Sunday. Let us make use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly wisdom and discernment. Let us also make use of another, fortitude, that we may stand firm and resolute in faith.
I will feature an example of this type of cleric tomorrow.
Next time — 1 Timothy 6:6-10
Pentecost Sunday, the Church’s birthday, is May 28, 2023.
Readings for Year A along with other resources for Pentecost can be found here.
There are two Gospel options in Year A. One is an extract — John 20:19-23 — from the Second Sunday of Easter, the Doubting Thomas reading, John 20:19-31.
The other option is from John 7, which follows. Emphases mine below:
John 7:37-39
7:37 On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,
7:38 and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
7:39 Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
This episode in our Lord’s ministry took place less than a year before His crucifixion.
It happened during the week-long Jewish feast of Sukkot, or Booths in the sense of tents or shelters. It is also known as the Feast of Tabernacles.
It commemorates God’s protection of and provision for the Israelites when they spent 40 years in the desert. Because it takes place in the early autumn, it is also a harvest feast and a time of great joy.
On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out that anyone who thirsts should come to Him and let those who believe drink, for Scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’ (verses 37, 38).
As is so often the case, there is much to examine in so few verses.
Matthew Henry’s commentary summarises what happened on the final day of Sukkot, the festival’s culmination:
… it was a custom of the Jews, which they received by tradition, the last day of the feast of tabernacles to have a solemnity, which they called Libatio aquæ—The pouring out of water. They fetched a golden vessel of water from the pool of Siloam, brought it into the temple with sound of trumpet and other ceremonies, and, upon the ascent to the altar, poured it out before the Lord with all possible expressions of joy.
John MacArthur has more:
At this feast, they celebrated the wilderness wanderings for 40 years when they lived in tents and booths and temporary housing that they moved as they migrated around the wilderness for those four decades. During that period of time, God protected them, preserved them, gave them food and drink. Finally, that ended with a generation dying and a few entering into the land of promise, the Canaan land, and the birth of the nation of Israel.
To commemorate God’s preservation of that nation during those years of wandering, God instituted in Leviticus 23, a feast, an annual feast of remembrance around the time of the Fall [autumn].
They were in that feast. It’s a week-long, and now it’s the last day. That’s very very important. The last day. Very significant. Let me tell you why. Every day of the feast, there was a ritual that was repeated. As far as we can tell from history, it was repeated every day. And this is what happened. Based on Leviticus 23:40, the instruction is this: that the people, the worshippers who celebrate the feast are to take the fruit of good trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook – several different kinds of trees. They are to get the branches. That’s Leviticus 23. They are to take the branches, and they are to use those branches to create booths to commemorate the wilderness wandering and the temporary housing remembering the goodness of God. That had developed into a very very special kind of ritual.
The Pharisees had instructed the people to all bring their branches, at each particular time of every day during the feast, to the main altar and to surround that altar and put up their boughs and their branches to create a kind of makeshift covering over the altar. This was in the temple area. Every day of the festival, thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people were there, and they would come, and they would create this covering of palm branches, willow branches, and other kinds of thick trees. They would form this kind of covering around the altar. The altar is then in the midst of this covering with all these people surrounding it – those holding the branches and those beyond. The high priest would then go to the Pool of Siloam by prescription. And he had a golden pitcher in his hand, and he would dip it in the water of the Pool of Siloam. And he would come back, and he would pour the water out on the altar as a remembrance of God providing the waters for the people of Israel at Meribah out of the rock.
And when he poured the water, historians tell us, the people were required – by the way, he came back through the water gate, which was so named because people brought water through it. So he would come back through the water gate, and historians tell us the people recite Isaiah 12:3. Isaiah 12:3 says, “With joy, shall we draw water out of the wells of salvation.” “With joy, shall we draw water out of the wells of salvation.”
So the whole ceremony remembers the wilderness wandering. It remembers the water provided there, but it’s all symbolic of God’s salvation, his deliverance of Israel temporarily during those 40 years – is merely a remembrance of God as a saving God who delivers his people and should remind them of soul salvation. The water, then, comes to the altar in the hand of the priest. It is poured out. And when it is poured out, and the people have recited the passage from Isaiah, they were required then to sing the Hallel. The Levitical choir would start the Hallel is sung 113-118. Hallel from which we get “Hallelujah,” hymns of praise. They would sing Psalms 113-118. So that’s the scene … it was the most celebratory of all the Jewish feasts.
So the whole dramatic ceremony is a vivid thanksgiving for God’s salvation of his people and protection and preservation and deliverance of his people in the wilderness wandering and how he supplied water for them. They also added to the celebration a prayer for more water that God would send rain. Now what makes this especially important on the last day, is that on the last day, before pouring out the water, the people marched around the altar seven times. Why? To commemorate the march around what city? The city of Jericho because that spelled the end of the wilderness wandering.
Jesus, ever obedient to Jewish law, was present. He issued an open invitation to everyone there. He stood and cried out in issuing it.
Henry explains our Lord’s intent in crying out:
Jesus stood and cried, which denotes, (1.) His great earnestness and importunity. His heart was upon it, to bring poor souls in to himself. The erection of his body and the elevation of his voice were indications of the intenseness of his mind. Love to souls will make preachers lively. (2.) His desire that all might take notice, and take hold of this invitation. He stood, and cried, that he might the better be heard; for this is what every one that hath ears is concerned to hear.
Henry discusses the importance of seizing the opportunity to pass a message onto a crowd:
Now on this day Christ published this gospel-call, because (1.) Much people were gathered together, and, if the invitation were given to many, it might be hoped that some would accept of it, Prov 1 20. Numerous assemblies give opportunity of doing the more good. (2.) The people were now returning to their homes, and he would give them this to carry away with them as his parting word. When a great congregation is to be dismissed, and is about to scatter, as here, it is affecting to think that in all probability they will never come all together again in this world, and therefore, if we can say or do any thing to help them to heaven, that must be the time. It is good to be lively at the close of an ordinance. Christ made this offer on the last day of the feast. [1.] To those who had turned a deaf ear to his preaching on the foregoing days of this sacred week; he will try them once more, and, if they will yet hear his voice, they shall live. [2.] To those who perhaps might never have such another offer made them, and therefore were concerned to accept of this; it would be half a year before there would be another feast, and in that time they would many of them be in their graves. Behold now is the accepted time.
Both commentators call our attention to the openness of His invitation.
Henry says:
The invitation itself is very general: If any man thirst, whoever he be, he is invited to Christ, be he high or low, rich or poor, young or old, bond or free, Jew or Gentile. It is also very gracious: “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink. If any man desires to be truly and eternally happy, let him apply himself to me, and be ruled by me, and I will undertake to make him so.”
MacArthur says:
There will be another one in chapter 8. There will be a number of invitations right on down to the very end of his ministry. In fact, I doubt whether a day went by in his ministry in which he didn’t invite people to salvation, to the Kingdom, to the forgiveness of sin and eternal life. There was likely not a day that he didn’t invite people to believe in him, to confess him as Lord and Savior, and receive the salvation that comes only through him.
Earlier on, John’s Gospel gives us another of our Lord’s invitations to living water, which He made to the Samaritan woman at the well, John 4:5-42:
4:10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
4:11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
4:12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
4:13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
4:14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
MacArthur reminds us:
You will also remember in chapter 6 as he was speaking of himself as the “bread of life.” He encouraged people to eat this bread and to drink as well. In a land where water was scarce, a very dry land, water was a great commodity to express the work of salvation, the benefit of salvation to a thirsty soul. So this is a striking invitation. There was a context for the woman at the well. There was a real well and real water, and he played off of that to talk about the water that will satisfy a soul. And that soul will never thirst again. Here again, there is a context for the analogy of water …
MacArthur says that Jesus chose a powerful moment to issue His invitation here:
It is on that day, at that moment, when they are all celebrating the deliverance and the salvation of God – with that as a backdrop, and perhaps – can’t be certain – but perhaps, in the quiet moment when the festival reaches its apex and the priest takes the golden pitcher and pours the water, it is perhaps at that moment that Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come and drink. Let him come to me.” Jesus dramatically captures the moment – turns it to himself. He must have positioned himself in the right place.
We read in verse 37 that he “cried out.” There’s that ekrazen again that strong word for yelling at the top of his voice. He wants to be heard. And in the drama of that moment, no doubt, he picked a moment when everybody was sort of holding their breath at the drama of the celebration. Jesus says, “‘You are thankful to God for water in the wilderness – water that satisfied the thirst of your forefathers. Come to me for water that quenches your soul.’” Your soul. You understand again, in a land where there’s so little water, how much water symbolized satisfaction – a necessity for life. So Jesus uses that analogy now for the third time really in the Gospel of John.
MacArthur discusses the elements of this invitation and their importance:
In the words that he says at that moment, there are three actions: “thirst,” “come,” “drink.” Three verbs. They really generally correspond to what the Medieval Latin fathers used to call notitia, fiducia, and assensus, the three elements necessary for saving faith. “Thirst,” that is the knowledge of the problem, the knowledge of the alienation, the knowledge of the deprivation, the knowledge of the condition and understanding of its implications, and including a knowledge of the source of water. Then “come,” that’s fiducia. That’s trust. And then “drink,” that’s assent.
Let’s kind of break those down a little bit. It’s pretty simple. The first tells of a recognized need: thirst. Thirst. Notice the general open invitation “If anyone is thirsty.” “If anyone is thirsty.” “If anyone is thirsty.” The invitations of Jesus were always unlimited. They were always universal. They were always open-ended. “‘If anyone is thirsty, come unto me all you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’” God told of the world that he gave his only begotten son that “whosoever believes shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Here again is another one of those invitations. “If you are thirsty.” Thirst is a craving. Thirst is a conscious craving. It’s something we know about. It’s something we’re fully aware of. We feel it, and the more thirst increases, the more anxious a person becomes. In fact, there can actually be a kind of madness that sets in if you cannot get a drink as you become more and more seriously thirsty.
What’s he talking about? He’s talking about a thirsty soul. A longing for deliverance, longing for hope, longing for peace, longing for forgiveness, for salvation, for liberation from the power of sin. If you are thirsting – anyone who is thirsting – anyone whose soul is parched, that’s where it all starts. It starts with that craving. Then the consciousness, the acute consciousness of that craving.
People come to Christ because they’re thirsty. Do you understand that? Because their souls are empty. That’s why when you do Evangelism, you don’t start with “come to Christ.” You start with the recognition of the desperate situation the sinner is in and try to help him understand that. So that’s where it all begins with thirst. Like the Philippian jailer who said, “What must I do to be saved?” That’s a thirsty soul crying out.
The second verb – the second action is “come.” It signifies the approach to him. “‘If any man will come after me” – Luke 9:23. Seeing him as the only source of soul satisfying, nourishing, living water. Come. Come to me. Come to Christ. It means, with all your heart and with all your will, you come to him. If he were here, you would do it with your feet, but he’s not here; you do it with your heart and your mind. If he were here, you would come and stand before him in your thirst. And you would fall on your knees, and you would cry out for him to give you the living water as the only source.
Spiritually speaking, it is to move toward Jesus Christ as the only source of your need. Turn your back on the world. Abandon your sin. Abandon your self-confidence. Cast your self at the feet of incarnate grace and truth in Christ. That’s “come.” No one else you can come to? He is the way, the truth, and the life. You come to him. You come to him alone. Let me remind you the only qualification is thirst – not morality, not religiosity, not good works, not being a benevolent person, not being “a basically good person.” There is no qualification like that. The only qualification is that you are thirsty. And very often, benevolent, basically good people, religious people, moral people don’t feel the thirst. That’s why when Jesus came, all the moral, religious people hated him. And it was the sinners and tax collectors and outcasts that came. It’s the thirsty that come. Nowhere else to go but him? He is the only one who can satisfy the soul.
Thirdly, “drink.” Drink means to appropriate – to appropriate. A river flowing through the parched valley doesn’t do any good unless you drink. Drinking means to take him, receive him, make him your own, embrace him. As he said to the woman at the well in John 4:14, “‘Drink, and you’ll never thirst.’” As he said in John 6, “‘You must eat and drink of me, my life, and my death.’” A songwriter wrote, “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold, I freely give the living water, thirsty one. Stoop down, and drink, and live. I came to Jesus and I drank of that life-giving stream. My thirst was quenched. My soul revived, and now I live in him.’” That’s a sentiment that every Christian can understand. I came; I drank; I took Christ in.
All of that is simply a way to break out what it means to believe.
Then there is belief itself, which Jesus mentioned next (verse 38):
… this may be the most remarkable part about this invitation. Look at verse 38: “‘He who believes in me, as the Scripture said,’” and by the way, he collects from several verses in Isaiah and even makes reference to Ezekiel 37, a kind of composite statement, “‘as the Scripture said, from his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” Let me give you a simple analogy. This water that flows to you when you come to Christ comes into your life doesn’t stay in you. You’re not a bucket. You’re not a reservoir. It goes through you. You are a fountain that becomes a river. Really amazing statement. Not only do we drink and have our soul thirst forever quenched, but we become the fountain and the river of living water to others as it flows from us.
Verse 38 talks about the impact of a believer on the world. It’s thrilling. We receive soul-refreshing spiritual water, which is really an analogy for spiritual life, eternal life, with all of its elements and components meaning conversion, redemption, justification, sanctification, adoption, everything. We receive all that – a constant spring of pure, cleansing water of life in us, sanctifying us, making us more like Christ. But at the same time, and the real key here is, we become a fountain that turns into a river for the world. The blessed one becomes the blessor. The recipient of sovereign grace becomes the channel of sovereign grace. And in not a trickle, but a gushing river.
This is just an amazing statement about how much your life matters … When you think about who matters in society, Christians matter because they are a saver of life unto life. They’re the fountain and river of living water that flows to the world. The results and people being redeemed and taken to eternal glory. That matters.
Therefore, MacArthur says that these invitations are more than historical episodes from our Lord’s ministry. They raise questions for us as well:
… I want to talk just a little bit about the matter of this invitation to begin with. Admiring Jesus, being impressed by Jesus, watching Jesus from afar, saying kind things about him is insufficient. It puts a person, in the end, in the same Hell as the people who hated Jesus, who hate him now, who reject him, who were guilty of his death even in Jerusalem at the Crucifixion. Admiring Jesus is not sufficient to grant eternal life. Some kind of superficial commendation of Jesus is not enough. The question is: what will you do with his invitations? What will you do with his invitations?
How were the people at the Sukkot celebration — and how are we — going to become that gushing river of water?
John explains that Jesus was speaking of the Holy Spirit, which believers then were to receive at the first Pentecost, although, when Jesus issued that invitation, the Spirit would not yet be with everyone, because our Lord had not yet been glorified (verse 39) through His death, resurrection and ascension.
Henry gives us this analysis:
Observe,
(1.) It is promised to all that believe on Christ that they shall receive the Holy Ghost. Some received his miraculous gifts (Mark 16 17, 18); all receive his sanctifying graces. The gift of the Holy Ghost is one of the great blessings promised in the new covenant (Acts 2 39), and, if promised, no doubt performed to all that have an interest in that covenant.
(2.) The Spirit dwelling and working in believers is as a fountain of living running water, out of which plentiful streams flow, cooling and cleansing as water, mollifying and moistening as water, making them fruitful, and others joyful; see ch. 3 5. When the apostles spoke so fluently of the things of God, as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2 4), and afterwards preached and wrote the gospel of Christ with such a flood of divine eloquence, then this was fulfilled, Out of his belly shall flow rivers.
(3.) This plentiful effusion of the Spirit was yet the matter of a promise; for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. See here [1.] That Jesus was not yet glorified. It was certain that he should be glorified, and he was ever worthy of all honour; but he was as yet in a state of humiliation and contempt. He had never forfeited the glory he had before all worlds, nay, he had merited a further glory, and, besides his hereditary honours, might claim the achievement of a mediatorial crown; and yet all this is in reversion. Jesus is now upheld (Isa 42 1), is now satisfied (Isa 53 11), is now justified (1 Tim 3 16), but he is not yet glorified. And, if Christ must wait for his glory, let not us think it much to wait for ours. [2.] That the Holy Ghost was not yet given. oupo gar hen pneuma—for the Holy Ghost was not yet. The Spirit of God was from eternity, for in the beginning he moved upon the face of the waters. He was in the Old-Testament prophets and saints, and Zacharias and Elisabeth were both filled with the Holy Ghost. This therefore must be understood of the eminent, plentiful, and general effusion of the Spirit which was promised, Joel 2 28, and accomplished, Acts 2 1, etc. The Holy Ghost was not yet given in that visible manner that was intended. If we compare the clear knowledge and strong grace of the disciples of Christ themselves, after the day of Pentecost, with their darkness and weakness before, we shall understand in what sense the Holy Ghost was not yet given; the earnests and first-fruits of the Spirit were given, but the full harvest was not yet come. That which is most properly called the dispensation of the Spirit did not yet commence. The Holy Ghost was not yet given in such rivers of living water as should issue forth to water the whole earth, even the Gentile world, not in the gifts of tongues, to which perhaps this promise principally refers. [3.] That the reason why the Holy Ghost was not given was because Jesus was not yet glorified. First, The death of Christ is sometimes called his glorification (ch. 13 31); for in his cross he conquered and triumphed. Now the gift of the Holy Ghost was purchased by the blood of Christ: this was the valuable consideration upon which the grant was grounded, and therefore till this price was paid (though many other gifts were bestowed upon its being secured to be paid) the Holy Ghost was not given. Secondly, There was not so much need of the Spirit, while Christ himself was here upon earth, as there was when he was gone, to supply the want of him. Thirdly, The giving of the Holy Ghost was to be both an answer to Christ’s intercession (ch. 14 16), and an act of his dominion; and therefore till he is glorified, and enters upon both these, the Holy Ghost is not given. Fourthly, The conversion of the Gentiles was the glorifying of Jesus. When certain Greeks began to enquire after Christ, he said, Now is the Son of man glorified, ch. 12 23. Now the time when the gospel should be propagated in the nations was not yet come, and therefore there was as yet no occasion for the gift of tongues, that river of living water. But observe, though the Holy Ghost was not yet given, yet he was promised; it was now the great promise of the Father, Acts 1 4. Though the gifts of Christ’s grace are long deferred, yet they are well secured: and, while we are waiting for the good promise, we have the promise to live upon, which shall speak and shall not lie.
MacArthur says:
… verse 39 is a prophecy. He spoke of the spirit “whom those who believed in him were to receive” for the Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified. The Holy Spirit couldn’t come until Jesus was glorified, ascended into Heaven. Then he sent the Holy Spirit, and … when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost – launched the church. And then the river on the inside began to flow to the world. And it happened instantaneously because immediately on the day of Pentecost, all those Galileans who didn’t know those multiple languages began to speak the wonderful works of God in all kinds of gentile languages as the river began to flow.
… Rivers of blessing begin to pour out of those believers early in Pentecost. Peter preaches, the river starts, and 3000 people are saved. They preach again; another 4000 are saved. Tens of thousands are being saved. In Jerusalem, it extends to Samaria, and we’re still living the history today. The river is unleashed on the world through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can make the river flow. He’s the power behind all witness – all witness.
MacArthur concludes:
So Jesus says, “‘For those of you who come to me and drink, you will not only be satisfied, but you will become a river of life to the world.’” That happened seven and a half months later on the day of Pentecost. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. What an amazing invitation to say not only will you have your soul totally satisfied forever with a water that’ll cause you to never thirst again – satisfy you forever, but your life will take on eternal significance. What an amazing invitation. That’s why I say this is the golden invitation of the Gospel of John. Rivers of water, not reserved for super saints or some kind of reservoir but, belonging to all believers all of whom become fountains that turn into rivers. What an invitation.
May all reading this enjoy a blessed Pentecost Sunday.
Eastertide finished the day before Pentecost. Next Sunday is Trinity Sunday. After that, until the first Sunday of Advent, where vestments are worn, celebrants wear green to mark what some denominations call ‘Ordinary Time’. Others designate those Sundays as being ‘after Pentecost’ or ‘after Trinity’.
This week brought a special treat for my far better half and me.
We went to London for an event and had an early dinner beforehand at a place that The Times‘s Giles Coren reviewed in November 2022: Noodle & Snack, 145 Cleveland St, London W1T 6QH, in Fitzrovia, a minute’s walk from Great Portland Street Tube station. It’s open from noon to 9 p.m.
Coren wrote:
It’s an awakening of the soul. I’m obsessed
While I wouldn’t go that far, Noodle & Snack is probably the most authentic Chinese restaurant in London, if not in the UK. I’ve never had such good Chinese food since Lee Ho Fook in London’s Chinatown. It used to be my go-to and had lots of Chinese customers, but it closed years ago.
Some things have changed since Coren reviewed the restaurant.
First, they are no longer licensed, so it’s soft drinks or jasmine tea only. That was okay, because we had wine at the event we went to later. However, it could be a show-stopper for those who want to unwind at lunch or dinner.
Secondly, they took Coren’s comments on board and have translated what was in Mandarin only to English and Mandarin. Thank goodness. The menu on the wall has more offerings than the menu on the table, so check out both of them.
Thirdly, she has a print of Coren’s column about the restaurant on the wall next to the cash register.
A lovely lady named Sally waited on Coren, and I think she waited on us, too. Coren had asked her for recommendations, so we did, too.
She said something that was music to our ears:
I don’t want to give you too much to eat.
She suggested the sweet and sour pork, a helping of vegetables and an order of boiled dumplings.
She suggested the same to Coren:
“Have the sweet and sour pork,” she advised me. “Proper. For Chinese people. Speciality from my home city of Shenyang.”
… it was wide, tenderised fillets of pork, floured and deep-fried twice for crispness, in a sweet and sour sauce made from two kinds of vinegar, brown not orange, with big slices of sweet onion and soft, roasty-tasting garlic, and truly life-changing.
It stayed crispy until the end, too. When I lived in the US, I used to order crispy beef done the same way in a spicy orange and Szechuan pepper sauce — one of my abiding food memories, even though I had it several times. I had only found it at that one restaurant though, and thought of it like a lost friend I’d never encounter again. Fortunately, I have been reunited. Beef, pork — it doesn’t matter. It’s the flour dredging and frying that counts.
Then there were the dumplings. Coren described them:
Now, the dumplings were not your silken steamed dim sum, but heftier, thicker and very much boiled. Ten of them in a portion, a daunting prospect, but then… so soft, so warming, and the pork filling mild and quite sweet but made tangy with aromatic vinegar. Unbelievably delicious.
I agree with everything but the dipping sauce. Ours was pretty much straight soy, no aromatic vinegar. That didn’t matter either, because the sweet and sour pork came with plenty of sauce.
The biang biang (bang bang) noodles are a must. These are not the normal noodles from the Orient that one expects, but thick pappardelle on steroids. As Coren put it:
… the biang biang noodles … were wide and chewy and fresh and stuck together in places, just like your mum would have made if your mum was from northern China and really good at cooking.
They came with a sprinkling of mild chili flakes and spring onions. Sally mixed the noodles together for us and we helped ourselves. We put the sweet and sour pork on top and had dumplings on the side.
We asked for knives and forks, because unless one is adept with chopsticks, the food is too unwieldy, especially the noodles. Sally happily obliged.
My only criticism is that the plates are really small. They could do with normal sized plates, because the food is so ample and you want to enjoy it while it’s still hot.
The bill for two came to £39.60, including a 10% service charge. While they take MasterCard, Sally says they prefer cash, so, for that amount, I paid in folding and told her to keep the change.
Coren really liked Noodle & Snack:
And that weekend I dreamt of Noodle & Snack, night and day. Esther kept asking, “What is it?” and I’d go, “Oh nothing, nothing…”
And at noon on Monday I was back, fifth time in eight days, this time with my office mate Charlie, who knows China better than me and wanted to see it. Sally brought us a cold chicken “snack” on the house that was clean and cool and fiery with Sichuan pepper. And I got the sweet and sour pork again for Charlie, who laughed because it was so good. And also aubergines that were floured and fried twice and so squishy banana-like inside I wanted to cry, but don’t have a name for as it wasn’t written or spoken in English at any point. And the best mapo tofu of all time.
I noticed that, on the table menu, they have duck spring rolls and a squid dish for those with more adventurous tastes. On the wall menu, two different tripe preparations are available along with more pork and vegetarian dishes. This menu is indicative only.
As Coren raved about them, we’ll try the floured and fried aubergines next time.
It should be noted that getting downstairs to the loo was somewhat unsettling, and I’m used to London’s downstairs conveniences. There is a banister on only the left-hand side of the stairs. I’m not as agile as I used to be in dress shoes. That said, the loo was immaculate, and my mother always said that was the deciding factor in a restaurant. If they care about the loo, they’ll care about your food, too.
If you’re in the neighbourhood, Noodle & Snack is a fine place to eat. Giles Coren’s review has much more about the restaurant’s decor, complete with photos. You can see more photos along with a few customer reviews here.
Talk about value for money. You won’t leave hungry.
This week, I chronicled two Royal photographers, Cecil Beaton and the 1st Earl of Snowdon.
King Charles III and his family have opted for another stellar snapper, Hugo Burnand, a Tatler veteran.
Burnand has not updated his Twitter feed since 2015, but these are some of the photos he took for a Tatler feature on London’s top retailers that year:
Hugo Burnand is the only Royal photographer to have been born outside of the UK.
He was born in Cannes, the delightful city on the Cote d’Azur which is home to the film festival. His mother, Susan Gordon, died tragically in a car accident the year after he was born. Fortunately, his stepmother Ursy Burnand raised him well and the two remain close. On his website, Burnand refers to her as his mother and she still helps him out in the studio. Being a photographer herself and nurturing the same talent in him from boyhood, her help must be invaluable.
Burnand attended Cheam School, where he won a photography contest. He completed his formal education at Harrow School, where he took portraits of his fellow students. He decided to pursue photography professionally at the age of 27.
In 1993, at the age of 30, Burnand began a long-standing relationship with Condé Nast, particularly Tatler, where regular readers of that magazine will have seen his work in the Bystander pages of many social events.
That year, he also married Louisa Hallifax, the daughter of the late Admiral Sir David John Hallifax, who served as Constable and Governor of Windsor Castle from 1988 to 1992, the year of his death. The Burnands have four children and two dogs.
Stylistically, Burnand’s photography is the polar opposite of Dafydd Jones‘s work which graced the pages of Tatler in the 1980s. Socialites can show Burnand’s photos of themselves to their grandmothers without having to answer questions, e.g. ‘But, darling, how could you let your date push you into the swimming pool?’
Burnand has had a long-running working relationship with the King and Queen since his years as the Prince of Wales. He took the official portraits of Charles and Camilla at their wedding in April 2005. Camilla was the one who enlisted Burnand. He then began photographing Princes William and Harry. In 2011, he was the official photographer at Prince William’s wedding, more about which here. He spent three weeks preparing for the shoot at Buckingham Palace, working closely with Catherine Middleton. It had to be timed for the fly-past at 1:30 that day. Ursy helped things move smoothly on the day by giving jelly beans to the page boys and girls. Burnand also took Charles’s official 60th birthday portrait in 2008.
In an interview shortly before Coronation Day, Burnand, 59,told The Telegraph that the 60th birthday portrait is among his favourites (emphases mine):
In a regal yet relaxed pose, wearing the ceremonial uniform of the Welsh Guards, the picture, taken three years after he married the future Queen, shows a man finally at ease with himself.
Revealing how it was taken at the end of another shoot, he explains: “It was very much a sort of for-the-hell-of-it picture. We were both there, had a camera and he was dressed in his Welsh Guards uniform. We discussed things together, what we may or may not do. And somewhere in the referencing, there was a Tissot painting, of Frederick Gustavus Burnaby.”
A Victorian cavalry officer, balloonist, adventurer, author and allegedly the strongest man in the British Army, Burnaby was painted in self-consciously languid style by the French artist in 1870 and the portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
It is not the first time Burnand had subconsciously recreated a historic piece. It was only when he was leaving the Waleses’ wedding – during which he was given just 26 minutes to capture the newlyweds – that he realised he had inadvertently based his final shot on a painting of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert surrounded by their five oldest children, painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in 1846 …
Anticipating his photographs on Coronation Day, he said he was well organised:
Musing whether the best photographs come at the end of shoots, because the subjects are more relaxed, he adds: “Maybe. With those two photographs, I sort of always knew we were going to take them and I know exactly what we’re doing this time.
“Funnily enough, this time some of those pictures are scheduled to be taken earlier on.” Having shepherded plenty of children through fashion shoots over the years, he is not ruling out the use of sweets again when persuading the likes of Prince George, nine, Princess Charlotte, eight, and Prince Louis, five, to pose.
“I wish I could bring the dogs,” he says. “But it might get too chaotic.”
Burnand is again on limited time to take the photographs, but as with the weddings, he has been preparing by carrying out “stop watch” dress rehearsals with “whomever I can find running round the corridors”. He is also bringing replacements for every single item of equipment in case of malfunctions.
He is no Cecil Beaton:
Burnand’s emphasis on lighting (“it’s so important I can’t think of a big enough word”) suggests he will not be using a backdrop as Beaton did – a necessity at a time when the technology was not advanced enough to light the subject of the photograph simultaneously with the surroundings.
Beaton added an air of theatricality and glamour by photographing the young Queen Elizabeth against a painted backdrop of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey.
Holding the Orb and Sceptre, and wearing the Imperial State Crown, Coronation Robes, and the Coronation Gown designed by Norman Hartnell, the use of the profile pose provided a sense of tradition and continuity.
No pressure then? Burnand chuckles. “Yes, Beaton has set down a sort of benchmark but I’m not copying him. I’m taking these as my own man.”
Burnand says that he wants his portraits to evoke an emotional reaction:
“Portraits are my passion,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who or what the portrait is of – be it the King, your father, a celebrity – I want you to have an emotional reaction to it, which arrests you for a little bit longer before you turn the page …”
Little wonder, then, that the King chose Burnand to capture a Coronation that isn’t just about pomp and pageantry but telling the next chapter in a deeply personal family story.
These are Burnand’s Coronation Day portraits:
I really like the next two. The first one, in particular, shows regal splendour:
Burnand told The Independent‘s Charlotte Cripps what Coronation Day was like. He is in the centre in the photo below, with his daughter Una on the left. The other people also work for him. Brompton bicycles were their means of transport:
On 6 May, as the nation was waking up, Burnand set off at 7am from his London mews house near Notting Hill Gate. With him were a team of six assistants, including his daughter Una, 25. They cycled to Buckingham Palace on bespoke, regal-coloured purple and ivory Brompton bikes in their formal attire – even Una in her pink silk dress.
“It took about 25 minutes – we didn’t want to break out in a sweat,” Burnand tells me from his kitchen, when we talk just days after the portraits have been released to the public. They travelled light; all cameras and other equipment were already in situ at the Palace. “It feels really weird setting off [for the day] without a camera for the biggest job of your life,” he laughs.
By taking official coronation portraits of the monarch, Burnand is joining a tradition that is over a century old – but he is familiar with royal subjects. The former Tatler photographer is the only photographer with a royal warrant, given By Royal Appointment by the Prince of Wales, and photographed William and Kate’s wedding in 2011 …
It may have been a day full of pomp and formality, freighted with historic importance, but Burnand says there was “a lovely buzz” in Buckingham Palace’s throne room. “There was definitely a happy feeling. It was cosy with family, children and friends milling about,” he tells me. Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were all part of the photoshoot, which made it “beautiful” and “uplifting”. “It was like the last bit of the race [for the royal family] – there was an energy there which I know I got in the pictures,” he says.
However, there was a touch of Cecil Beaton after all:
For his solo portrait of Charles, Burnand had consciously mirrored society photographer Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The painterly portrait of Charles shows him in his full regalia, wearing the imperial state crown, his back slightly to one side of the official state chair in which he sits. His position is similar to that of his mother when she posed for Beaton, when she, like her son now, held the orb and sceptre with cross.
There’s no escaping Beaton, the daddy of them all.
You can see a more relaxed pre-Coronation portrait of the King and Queen here. In 2017, Burnand appeared in Tatler at his exhibition that year and at another in 2000. The magazine also featured his favourite portraits.
You, too, can have your portrait or wedding photos taken by Hugo Burnand. He is not just for Royals. He also seems like a very pleasant man.
In the summer of 1943, when Antony Armstrong-Jones left his prep school — Sandroyd — for Eton, no less, the headmaster wrote in the boy’s final report that:
the 13-year-old ‘may be good at something, but it’s nothing we teach here’.
At Eton, Armstrong-Jones excelled at sports. In March 1945, he was in the ‘extra special weight’ class of the School Boxing Finals. The following year saw him earn two flattering mentions for boxing in the Eton College Chronicle. In 1947, he was a coxswain in the school’s Fourth of June Daylight Procession of Boats. The Fourth of June is Eton’s unrivalled sports day, with parents coming along to enjoy the contests and the festivities. Rowers wear boaters draped with elaborate garlands of flowers, a tradition that dates back to the 18th century to celebrate George III’s birthday. The King was one of the school’s greatest patrons.
Gentlemen’s outfitters New & Lingwood‘s post, complete with photos about the day, explains:
At a certain point in the procession, the crews of each boat stand and raise their flower adorned boaters to cheer the [King], the School and the memory of George III whilst shaking the flowers from their boaters into the river. They then resume their seats and row on for the next VIII to do the same.
The three most senior boats stand with their oars fixed resting on the water whilst the remaining boats raise their oars to the vertical and then salute with their boaters, a tricky thing to do. Sometimes, the consequences are obvious, and early baths result.
All the boys are dressed in naval uniforms of the mid 19th century, the coxes as those of Officer’s and the oarsmen in those of Ratings (Able Seamen).
But I digress.
Armstrong-Jones went up to Cambridge to read architecture at Jesus College. Whilst there, he coxed the winning boat in the 1950 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race along the Thames, an early highlight of the social season. Tatler has a photo of him afterwards.
Having failed his second-year exams, he moved to London where he became an apprentice to the Royal and society photographer Baron, Stirling Henry Nahum (1906-1956).
Biography tells us that creativity ran in Armstrong-Jones’s family:
His great-grandfather was famed Punch magazine cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne, and two of his uncles were noted architects …
His mother was the debutante and socialite Anne Messel, who became the Countess of Rosse when she remarried. One of her brothers, Oliver Messel, was a stage designer.
His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister. He and Anne divorced in 1935, when Tony was only five years old. Anne married Michael Parsons, the 6th Earl of Rosse, later that year. Rosse had several estates in Ireland and was known as The Adonis of the Peerage.
Tony’s sister, Susan Anne Armstrong-Jones, also married an Irish peer, John Vesey, the 6th Viscount de Vesci.
From this we can see that Tony had many connections in high society. Not surprisingly, his uncle Oliver, recommended him for commissions of theatrical portraits. Other photographs, which were fashion shoots, appeared in Tatler and Queen magazines.
The auction house Christies notes that during those early years:
This raffish figure with a studio in Pimlico and a fondness for motorbikes had developed quite a name for himself by the late 1950s.
The third photo in this Tatler feature shows Armstrong-Jones in 1957.
That was the year that someone at court suggested that he be the official photographer on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth tour on the Royal Yacht Britannia. The aforementioned Christies profile notes that not everyone was on board with the suggestion:
The Duke’s personal secretary, Michael Parker, however, flatly rejected the idea on grounds that Armstrong-Jones was ‘far too bohemian’.
Parker appears to have been overruled, as Armstong-Jones took the official photos of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their tour of Canada that year.
Meanwhile, Princess Margaret was getting over her relationship with the dashing Peter Townsend, a divorcé. They met when the latter was still married. He divorced his wife in 1952, the year that Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne and became Defender of the Faith. The romance caused no end of controversy, especially when Townsend proposed in 1953. Marrying someone who was divorced went against the Church of England’s teachings and it was decided that the Princess and Townsend had to break up.
An April 2023 Tatler article gives us the highlights:
They had reportedly become engaged in April 1953 following Townsend’s divorce from his wife, Rosemary Pratt, Marchioness Camden, in order to commit to Margaret.
However, in 1955, Princess Margaret officially announced the end of her engagement to Townsend on the radio, saying, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others’. Townsend was a divorcé and so marriage to him would have been scandalous. Their relationship was depicted in Netflix series The Crown.
Princess Margaret met Armstrong-Jones at a dinner party in 1958.
The Tatler article says (emphases mine):
Both Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend went on to marry others: Townsend married Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959 and in 1960, Princess Margaret married Antony Armstrong-Jones. Their relationship between the princess and Armstrong-Jones was kept a secret until they officially announced their engagement on 27 February 1960. Antony … was made Lord Snowdon on their wedding day …
Armstrong-Jones proposed with an engagement ring designed to look like a rosebud; probably a reference to Princess Margaret’s middle name, which was Rose.
He had designed the ring himself.
The couple married at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960, with 2,000 guests in attendance. Theirs was the first Royal wedding to be televised, and 300 million people watched it worldwide. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, officiated. An appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony followed. The couple took a six-week honeymoon on the Royal yacht Britannia. Tatler has a fascinating photo album of the day.
One of the memorable items of the day was the Poltimore Tiara that Princess Margaret wore. A 2023 Tatler article, ‘Sale of Princess Margaret’s wedding tiara reportedly left Lord Snowdon heartbroken’, gives us its history:
Princess Margaret’s late ex-husband, Lord Snowdon, who died in 2017, was reportedly ‘crushed’ that his children sold his former wife’s wedding tiara in 2006, a new episode of Channel 5 series, Secrets of the The Royals, reportedly claims.
The episode claims that ‘David Linley and his sister Sarah broke their father Lord Snowdon’s heart’ with their decision to sell 800 of their late mother’s items, including the Poltimore Tiara, according to the Daily Mail, who appears to have seen a preview episode of the series. Speaking on camera, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, wife of the 11th Earl of Sandwich, reportedly adds, ‘This Christies’ auction was heartbreaking for Lord Snowdon… in fact, he wrote to his children asking them to stop it.’ Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret had divorced in 1978.
Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones’s two children, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon (formerly Viscount Linley) and Lady Sarah Chatto, raised nearly £14 million by selling their mother’s items in 2006, four years after her death aged 71 …
The tiara was sold for £920,000, which far exceeded its estimated value of £150-200,000. A picture of Princess Margaret sitting in the bath, wearing nothing but the tiara, was released to the public by her family in 2006, before being removed from public view 11 years later.
The tiara, made in 1870 by Garrard – the royal jeweller behind Princess Diana’s engagement ring and the Amethyst Cross which was recently sold to Kim Kardashian – features an elaborate cluster of diamonds, scroll motifs and a brown ribbon which makes the tiara almost appear to float upon the head.
Originally made for Lady Poltimore, the wife of the second Baron Poltimore and Treasurer to Queen Victoria’s household, it remained in her family until it was acquired by the Royal Family at auction in early 1959, months before the then Antony Armstrong-Jones proposed to Princess Margaret that October.
The princess wasted no time in wearing the tiara. She donned the twinkling diadem to the ballet at Covent Garden in May 1959, during a state visit from the Shah of Iran. She also wore it as a necklace on a number of occasions before her wedding day; the flexible design of the tiara allowed it too be broken down into a necklace and 11 brooches.
But it was on her June 1960 wedding day that the tiara had its starring moment, perfectly finishing the silk organza Norman Hartnell gown. The 2006 buyer of the tiara remains unknown.
But I digress.
Christies says that the Duke of Edinburgh enjoyed joking to the courtier about the fact that the photographer he had deemed unsuitable in 1957 had married into the Royal Family:
the Duke of Edinburgh found great amusement in telling Parker that the ‘bohemian’ was to become his brother-in-law.
The couple settled into married life:
The couple settled into apartments at Kensington Palace, but Lord Snowdon (as the groom officially became known) kept his friendships with London’s leading writers, actors and artists.
Biography says:
In the 1960s, Lord Snowdon landed a job as the picture editor of The Sunday Times magazine. By the 1970s, his work had placed him among England’s most well-respected photographers.
Of Snowdon’s approach to his subjects, the Christies article says:
As for the style of his portrait photography, it has been described as ‘immaculately ordered but emotionally detached’. Which is to say, his images are pure, powerful and uncluttered, yet marked by a certain distance between himself and his subjects.
‘I don’t want people to feel at ease,’ Snowdon said of his approach, as if happy to leave any friendship he had with his sitters at the studio door. He wasn’t one for chatting while he worked. On getting down to business, ‘an almost unearthly feeling of suspension’ developed, [one-time Vogue art director Patrick] Kinmonth says, as the photographer set about the ‘palpable hunt for his image’, waiting for the sitter to reveal something telling about themselves.
Meanwhile, Cecil Beaton, about whom I have written, was still photographing the Royals. However, Snowdon had greater all-round access to the family and took any number of candid shots.
A Town & Country magazine article, complete with Snowdon photographs, says:
Before Snowdon, Cecil Beaton had been the royals’ go-to portraitist. Like Snowdon, Beaton was a photographer who himself became the subject of renown, a socialite with an artsy bent who gained access to the most elite circles, a Vogue photographer who turned his lens to the Windsors. But when the Earl of Snowdon began snapping the royals, he did it in a markedly new way.
The painted backgrounds and stoic composition that Beaton had used to mimic centuries of royal portraiture were gone. Snowdon shunned bulky, large-format cameras in favor of newer, lighter ones, allowing him to move and improvise. That, combined with his genuine intimacy with his now-family, allowed him to capture something close to spontaneity.
Close, because the royals had a diminished capacity for informality. “The royal family is photographed so frequently, and certainly by the time that Snowdon began photographing the royals, they were very used to sitting for photographs,” Susanna Brown, the V&A’s Curator of Photographs, explains. “They cannot help but perform for the camera; they’ve been so well trained.”
Even after the couple divorced, Snowdon remained close to the Royal Family:
Long after his marriage to Princess Margaret ended, Snowdon continued to photograph the royal family. (And for the record, Kinmonth says that despite Tony and Margaret’s well-publicized troubles, even after they separated, “they got on like a house on fire.”)
One Tatler article I read said that the Queen Mother was deeply disappointed to hear that the couple separated. She said it was a shame, because ‘Tony was so good at charades’.
By then, Cecil Beaton had suffered a stroke and would die in 1980.
Town & Country‘s interview with Patrick Kinmonth reveals Snowdon as a witty, yet humble, man:
Lord Snowdon never aspired to “high art,” whatever that is. He claimed it was his interest in gadgets that first drew him to cameras, but he wouldn’t commit to a career behind the lens until pursuing, then flunking out of, an architecture program. Even then, he flatly refused to acknowledge his work as art.
After the Sunday Times published an investigation he’d worked on with journalist Marjorie Wallace, she recalls him writing to her, “Darling, thank you so much for the words. I just take the snaps.”
This attitude may have been a holdover from the very beginning of his career, when he was just Antony Armstrong-Jones, an upper-middle-class son of a barrister and a remarried Countess, when he’d document society events at the “grand houses.” Back then, explains Robert Muir, a curator and former British Vogue picture editor, event photographers “went round the side, you didn’t go through the front door.”
Armstrong-Jones eventually found his way to the front door. If he rejected high art, high status was much more up his alley. Snowdon seemed to revel in the notoriety his 1960 marriage to Princess Margaret afforded him. “He made this dimension of royalness into a strange kind of fairy dust,” Kinmonth says. And it was sprinkled atop of his already charismatic personality.
His newfound fame as Princess Margaret’s husband reinforced something that had already been percolating in the public imagination: the photographer as star. The London creative set in the 1960s had a tendency to treat rising lensmen (sadly, they were mostly men) with the same renown as actors, artists, and filmmakers—even as Snowdon continued to insist, with a grin, that he was just a “snapper” …
It’s not possible to separate Snowdon’s oeuvre from his royal biography—nor would he want that to happen. He knew his reputation was inseparable from that of the Windsors, Kinmonth says, and “it was something he was much more delighted with than disappointed by.”
The National Portrait Gallery has an extensive set of Snowdon photos from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Guardian also has a stunning retrospective, as does Christies. Tatler has a splendid collection of photos of Snowdon throughout his life, both alone and with Princess Margaret, as does The Sun.
Biography tells us more about Snowdon’s later years:
In the late 1990s, Lord Snowdon was awarded life peerage, affording him the title of baron and securing his seat in the House of Lords following the exclusion of hereditary peers.
In 2001, Lord Snowdon’s photography was featured in a career retrospective held at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2007, his work was exhibited in a show called “In Camera: Snowdon at the Pallant House Gallery,” in Chichester, England.
After Snowdon spent four years collaborating with writer Anne de Courcy, his biography was released in 2008, confirming speculation that Snowdon had many affairs throughout his marriages and fathered an illegitimate daughter (Polly Fry of the Fry chocolate dynasty) just prior to marrying Princess Margaret, as well as an illegitimate son (Jasper) during his second marriage with Country Life features editor Melanie Cable-Alexander …
Christies says that Snowdon was particularly empathetic towards the disabled:
His experience of polio, incidentally, left him with a slight limp — as well as a lifelong concern for disabled people. He’d go on to fight a successful campaign against British Rail to improve its access to wheelchair passengers; and in 1980 he set up the Snowdon Award Scheme (now the Snowdon Trust), a charity that helps disabled students in further education.
Today, David Linley is the 2nd Earl of Snowdon. Tatler says:
He inherited his father’s title to become the 2nd Earl in 2017. Recently divorced from his wife, Serena, he has two children, 23-year-old Charles, Viscount Linley, and 20-year-old Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones. Honorary chairman for Christie’s Europe, Middle East and Russia, he’s also a furniture designer and is known to be close to his cousin, King Charles III.
Between Cecil Beaton and Lord Snowdon, the Royal Family were blessed with two outstanding photographers, each with his own inimitable style.
Tomorrow, I will take a look at Hugo Burnand, King Charles III’s official photographer.
Last week, I wrote about society photographers Richard Young and Dafydd Jones.
The first famous high society photographer of the 20th century was Cecil Beaton. Unlike Young and Jones, however, Beaton was of his world and in it.
Early years
Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born in London’s leafy Hampstead on January 14, 1904.
His grandfather had founded a timber merchants firm and Cecil’s father Ernest, an amateur actor, worked for the company. Ernest and his wife Etty had four children. Their other son, Reginald, died prematurely in 1933.
Young Cecil and his siblings had the best of everything, including a nanny. She had a Kodak 3A camera which she taught him how to use. Fascinated, Cecil began taking pictures of his sisters and mother.
When he became proficient, he began sending his photographs to society magazines.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Education
Cecil attended Heath Mount School, still in Hampstead at the time, then went to Harrow in north west London. Although he had little interest in school, he ended up at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture. By then, he was making contacts at Cambridge as he continued to photograph. He also designed theatre costumes. It was during those years that he had his first photo published in Vogue and two photos of his sister Nancy in Tatler. He went down from Cambridge in 1925 with no degree. However, London beckoned, so he returned to the capital and never looked back.
The 1920s and the Bright Young Things
In the 1920s, Beaton’s world intersected with that of a former classmate of his, Evelyn Waugh, who used to bully him at Heath Mount School. As a young adult, Waugh had his novel Vile Bodies published. It featured high society characters ‘the Bright Young People’, also called the Bright Young Things.
A 2020 Tatler article, ‘Stars in his eyes: Cecil Beaton and his Bright Young Things’ describes that world and his role in it, complete with photographs (emphases mine):
Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties’ – this was how Evelyn Waugh depicted the era of the 1920s, when the elite of the younger generation, determined to throw off the gloom of the Great War, dedicated themselves to entertainment. As Waugh portrayed them in his novel Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) were funny, frenzied and frivolous, capering from party to party. Among them, and, like Waugh, an astute recorder of the period, was the photographer Cecil Beaton, whose portraits of the era’s leading lights make up the dazzling cast of Bright Young Things, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
Unfortunately, the exhibition had to be cancelled because of the pandemic. This Tatler article has a set of photographs from it.
Beaton and Waugh never did become friends:
Beaton had been at prep school with Waugh, who bullied him cruelly. Beaton later described Waugh as ‘a very sinister character’, while Waugh pilloried Beaton in Decline and Fall as the society photographer David Lennox, who ‘emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian electric brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass’.
Beaton was hardly standing on the sidelines with his camera. He played a lead role in these parties:
Before long he was embedded in a world of aristocracy, theatre and, perhaps most significantly, a circle of exuberant young people intent on immersing themselves in the most extravagant and imaginative forms of self-indulgence …
Within this world, Beaton was both observer and recorder, as well as eager participant, appearing in pink satin and heavy make-up as a 17th-century dandy, as the Madam of a brothel, and in a coat covered in broken eggshells and roses.
Among the many of Beaton’s friends whom he photographed at this period was the very wealthy, very camp Stephen Tennant, son of one of the renowned Wyndham sisters. Tennant adored dressing up and being photographed by Beaton in outrageous poses – in flowing court dress as Queen Marie of Romania at the Impersonation Party, or heavily rouged as the poet Shelley at the Pageant of Hyde Park. After Tennant complimented him on his work, Beaton wrote in his diary: ‘I felt puffed with pride that he so gushed at me.’
Another sumptuous occasion was the Great Pageant of Lovers through the Ages, which took place in 1927 at the New Theatre in the presence of Princess Mary and Princess Arthur of Connaught, with Tennant as Prince Charming in a pink wig and Beaton as Lucien Bonaparte in an ornate satin coat with long tails. Also present were two of the most celebrated actresses of the era, Gladys Cooper, who went as Helen of Troy, and Tallulah Bankhead, as Cleopatra.
In Beaton’s view, he had by now achieved the perfect balance at the centre of two interconnected worlds – society and the theatre. A subject of his who combined both was Lady Diana Cooper, daughter of the Duchess of Rutland and one of the most famous beauties of her day. Her face, as described by Beaton, ‘was a perfect oval, her skin white marble. Her lips were japonica red, her hair flaxen, her eyes blue love-in-the-mist.’ He once photographed her as the Madonna in The Miracle, a play directed by Max Reinhardt, which required Lady Diana, serene and holy, to stand throughout most of the performance motionless in her niche on the wall.
… accurately describing himself as ‘a scheming snob’, Beaton adored being at the centre of this wild and frivolous world. He made friends everywhere …
Also part of the fray were the very wealthy Bryan Guinness and his beautiful wife Diana, one of the Mitford sisters. The young Guinnesses soon became one of the most fashionable couples in town, generous hosts who entertained lavishly …
It was at the very end of the decade, the season of 1929, that the Guinnesses gave an extravagant 1860s party, which, as it turned out, was to be almost the last of the period dominated by the Bright Young People. The spark had already begun to fizzle out and times were changing. In November, Beaton, by now highly paid and much in demand, left for his first visit to America, where in the years to come he was to pursue a remarkable career in Hollywood and New York. His horizons were expanding, his reputation continuing to grow, both as a photographer and as a designer of stage sets and costumes.
Beaton hosted the next big blow out party himself in 1937. At his Fête Champêtre were his friends from the Bright Young Things days a decade earlier. Ever the dandy, he had four changes of attire and the party did not end until 7 a.m. the following day.
The party took place at Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, which he leased between 1930 and 1945:
Here many of the original Bright Young People gathered for a magnificent garden party, photographs of which appeared in Life magazine. The marquee was decorated with flowers and ribbons, the waiters wore animal masks and 30 supper tables were designed to look like ballet dancers.
Beaton entertained frequently and lavishly at Ashcombe House, which is a huge Georgian estate.
His photographs showed up in an important estate collection in 2021. He often took photographs of Dame Edith Sitwell, one of them being in 1926. Dame Edith lived at Weston Hall, which went up for sale that year. Its varied contents later went to auction.
In October 2021, Tatler reported on the contents:
For three centuries, the Sitwells have dominated the literary and artistic landscapes, with generation after generation of writers, eccentrics and creatives amongst their number. Since the 18th century Weston Hall in Northamptonshire has been the family seat, until it was sold earlier this year. Now, its contents are making up a landmark auction at Dreweatts, charting not only the fascinating history of this important family, but also of England itself.
Joe Robinson, Head of House Sales at Dreweatts and taking up the mammoth challenge of cataloguing the works, said, ‘Weston Hall was a fascinating encapsulation of not just the Sitwell family history, but also the social history of Britain over the last few centuries. With the extensive collection of works having been preserved in the house for so long, it has been thrilling to go on a journey of discovery with the family, to uncover so many hidden treasures with such wonderful provenance. The stories behind the works truly enrich the pieces and when you purchase a work from this sale, you know you are buying a true piece of history.’
A veritable treasure trove, highlights of the collection include many artworks that were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 1994, in a show titled The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s. One such piece is a carved fluorite dress ring featuring two mythical beasts that belonged to Edith Sitwell, one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. There are multiple other pieces of Edith’s jewellery and clothing included in the sale, who was known for her avant garde fashion sense and sometimes shocking behaviour …
Fans of celebrated society snapper Cecil Beaton will also no doubt be keen to get their hands on a whole cache of rare photographs of the family, up for sale for the first time. One of his most famous portraits was of Dame Edith Sitwell wearing an ostrich feather hat, pictured below, while others included are of Georgia Sitwell, the wife of writer Sacheverell Sitwell, taken circa 1927.
Food critic William Sitwell wrote in The Telegraph at the time that he spent many happy days at Weston Hall and remembers Dame Edith’s many party costumes left for the younger family members in a dressing up box.
He told Tatler:
This sale offers countless individuals and collectors the chance to own items and collections that are part of the fabric of English history. It’s extraordinarily diverse, representing the wide interests and experiences of my family and our ancestors. After the sadness of leaving Weston it will be heart-warming to think that works of art and furniture, which are like so many close friends to myself and my family, will find new homes and become part of new, wonderful collections.
Beaton also snapped the Mitford sisters, who were part of the Bright Young Things. In 2021, one of Nancy Mitford’s novels, The Pursuit of Love, was made into a television mini-series. Tatler reported on the Mitfords’ descendants and introduced the sisters to a new generation. There was no escaping Cecil Beaton or Evelyn Waugh:
Recognised for their beauty, eccentricity, conflicting political views and sharp intellect, the Mitford sisters were undoubtedly the ultimate It Girls of the 20th century. Everyone was captivated by ‘The Six’; whether it was Evelyn Waugh who spent over two decades writing 500 letters to Nancy, Cecil Beaton who captured Diana in theatrical costume time and time again, or youngest sister, Deborah, who later became Britain’s most loved Duchess as The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire.
Royal photographer
In July 1939, Beaton’s life took a seemingly improbable new turn.
One day he received a phone call out of the blue. The Victoria & Albert Museum tells us of his diary entry:
The telephone rang. “This is the lady-in-waiting speaking. The Queen wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon” … In choosing me to take her photographs, the Queen made a daring innovation. It is inconceivable that her predecessor would have summoned me – my work was still considered revolutionary and unconventional.
That Queen was Elizabeth, George VI’s wife and mother of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
I read about that in Tatler. Beaton thought it was a prank call and slammed down the phone on the lady-in-waiting. She patiently rang back to arrange an appointment.
The V&A exhibition has a stunning photograph of the then-Queen Consort in Buckingham Palace Garden as well as subsequent ones of the Royals:
The opportunity to photograph Queen Elizabeth, Queen Consort of King George VI, in 1939 was the high point of Beaton’s career to date. Published two months after the outbreak of the Second World War, his images presented a sense of continuity with a magnificent pre-war Britain. Several wartime sittings of the Queen and her family would reinforce his vision of a seemingly unshakable monarchy and witness the transformation of Princess Elizabeth from girl to young woman.
Beaton created sumptuous backdrops when the photo shoots took place indoors:
The flowers that appear in many of Beaton’s portraits were often picked from his own garden. Cascading arrangements of roses, carnations, lilies and hydrangeas filled the space between a photographic backdrop and the sitter, and were an essential prop in the creation of his idealised pastoral scenes.
Beaton was enamoured of the Royal ladies. Wikipedia says:
Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication.[17] Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was his favourite royal sitter, and he once pocketed her scented hankie as a keepsake from a highly successful shoot.
War photographer
Not many of us probably know that Beaton also became a celebrated war photographer, so much so that he is partially credited for America’s entry into it. Wikipedia says that, in between his Royal photo shoots:
… the Queen recommended him to the Ministry of Information (MoI). He became a leading war photographer, best known for his images of the damage done by the German Blitz. His style sharpened and his range broadened, Beaton’s career was restored by the war.[16]
… During the Second World War, Beaton was first posted to the Ministry of Information and given the task of recording images from the home front. During this assignment he captured one of the most enduring images of British suffering during the war, that of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet officially joined the war, but images such as Beaton’s helped push the Americans to put pressure on their government to help Britain in its hour of need.[5]
After the war ended, Beaton bought a stately manor, Reddish House, in Wiltshire, more about which below.
In September 1951, once it was politically acceptable and socially safe to party again, Beaton was one of the guests at Le Bal Oriental in Venice. In a 2020 article, Tatler described it, complete with photographs:
Venice was abuzz with decadence and glamour on 3 September 1951, as the beautiful and the damned gathered for eccentric aristocrat Count Carlos de Beistegui’s high society gathering Le Bal Oriental – the first since World War II.
Guests were invited six months prior, in order to give them enough time to design their decadent costumes, with the theme inspired by a fresco in his home, the Palazzo Labia. The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the chosen artwork; it depicts a wager between Cleopatra and Mark Antony as to which one could provide the most expensive feast. A worthy inspiration for a dress code, no doubt.
The guest list itself was superlative: the brightest stars and hottest young things of the era. Fashion designer Christian Dior attended in a costume designed by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, while Dalí wore one by Dior. Cecil Beaton took the photographs, while director and actor Orson Welles held court alongside society beauties including Countess Teresa Foscari Foscolo and Patricia Lopez-Huici de Lopez-Willshaw, as well as Aga Khan III.
Then there were the details. Arrival by gondola, after a five-day journey across Europe for many, with cheers from waiting Venetians; 70 footmen dressed in the exact liveries worn at the Duchess of Richmond’s famous ball held the night before Waterloo; thirty guests attired in Pierre Cardin (it essentially launched his career); a 6am end time and a host wearing 16-inch platform shoes.
There is a self-portrait of Beaton:
Cecil Beaton standing on the balcony of the Palazzo Labia dressed as a clergyman
Very convincing it is, too, as by that point Beaton had grey hair and looked seriously distinguished.
Costume design for My Fair Lady
Beaton was somewhat of an artsy polymath. He could act, sing, photograph — and design costumes as well as stage sets.
My Fair Lady put him firmly in the spotlight.
A 2022 Tatler retrospective of the play and the film, complete with photographs, tells us:
Thursday, 15 March 1956: The opening night of My Fair Lady on Broadway. Cecil Beaton had spent month after exhausting month designing and supervising the costumes for a production he was hugely enthusiastic about but not yet entirely convinced by. The run-up had been challenging. Both revolving stages malfunctioned, the sets were flimsy, the curtains got caught up and wouldn’t come down, and the dress rehearsal was a disaster. Blizzards kept audiences away from the try-out evenings. Rex Harrison, playing Henry Higgins, was plagued with fear and self-doubt, manifesting itself in monstrous displays of egotism. Beaton found him ‘beneath contempt’, and only by a miracle, he said, did he prevent an ugly confrontation, while an exasperated 20-year-old Julie Andrews, playing Eliza Doolittle, rehearsing the last-act fight with Harrison, threw her slippers in his face with such force the entire chorus applauded her from the stalls.
Beaton need not have worried. He recorded the opening night in his diary: ‘Every joke was appreciated, every nuance enjoyed and the various numbers were received with thunderclaps. The success was beyond all expectation.’ It was also, he added, ‘an electric evening…I am grateful and overwhelmed.’ Curtain call after curtain call. So frenzied was the reception – in the days following, the police were drafted in to keep order at the box office – he now recognised My Fair Lady for what it was: the greatest triumph of his life so far, the high point of his career, though ‘it has taken such a long time to achieve’, he said wistfully. It won him his second of four Tony awards.
By the time the run ended in 1962 after nearly 3,000 performances, My Fair Lady was the highest grossing Broadway show in history. The London production at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which opened in 1958, ran for five and a half years and was reckoned to be the most expensive then staged in the West End.
Beaton had worked on The Chalk Garden sets and costumes in 1955, but loathed it:
Enid Bagnold’s curiosity, part melo- drama, part comedy of manners, opened on Broadway to rave reviews but by then Cecil had fallen out with just about everyone connected …
When he was dropped from the London production, it opened a window for him on what would become My Fair Lady. If Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe had not come into his life, he said, he would surely have given up on the theatre.
Beaton, having been born halfway through the Edwardian (Edward VII) period, was a natural fit for My Fair Lady:
As a boy, Beaton had collected glitter-coated postcards of the leading ladies of Edwardian opera and theatre, one of his greatest heroines being the musical comedy star Zena Dare, whom delightedly he got to dress when, at 70, she took on the role of Mrs Higgins for My Fair Lady’s West End run. His childhood informed his outlook on life; the observations made at an early age remained constant, he would say, while around him the world would change.
His costumes for My Fair Lady were rooted in his memory bank of Edwardiana, memorialising the world of music hall comedy, his mother’s formal dresses, his Aunt Jessie’s ostrich-feather hats, fin-de- siècle fashion plates – and, famously, for the black-and-white Ascot scene, he reinterpreted the ‘Black Ascot’ of 1910 held in mourning for the late king.
Beaton was exacting and resourceful:
In all, Beaton designed more than 150 costumes and kept a punctilious eye on their construction, irritated when a cartwheel hat had to be refashioned three times. Julie Andrews recalled they were so over-scaled that the wearer was often obliged to enter a room sideways – if, that is, they could see at all from beneath the exaggerated brims.
Beaton was exacting and resourceful. Some curtains from his former country home, Ashcombe, had once been appliquéd with 10,000 or so pearl buttons. Taken out of storage, the buttons were detached and sent across the Atlantic to do service for the Pearly Kings and Queens attempting to get Alfred Doolittle to the church on time.
When Beaton’s fastidiousness combined with first-night nerves, it was a combustible mix. After the first try-out before the Broadway opening, he was apoplectic with Andrews who had, in all innocence, worn a picture hat back to front. In her dressing room, unsure if everything had gone right, the first words she heard were not of reassurance, but from Beaton flinging the door open, grabbing the hat and shouting: ‘Not this way round. That way round. How could you get that wrong?’ However, the reviews were ecstatic and Beaton was now a Broadway celebrity in his own right, the consummate showman: ‘I felt I was on the crest of a wave and must enjoy the ride…’
The ride was by no means over. Two years later, in April 1958, with the main leads reprising their roles, the show opened in London. Beaton had remodelled several hats and made 20 new costume designs. He considered them far superior to the Broadway ones, though he was delighted to hear that in fashionable Manhattan, belle-époque-style chiffon blouses and delicately pointed boots were now all the rage. Always eager for self-publicity, Beaton wasted no time in getting his pictures of My Fair Lady’s leading players into Vogue and Ladies’ Home Journal. He accepted a commission to design a range of modern clothes based on his costumes, as well as a line of children’s swimwear, and held gallery shows of his sketches. Eventually he would mine it all for a standalone book, Cecil Beaton’s Fair Lady (1964).
Though Rex Harrison played up again, the momentum of Broadway was firmly behind London and My Fair Lady opened in a blaze of glory. At a special charity performance, attended by the Queen and Prince Philip, crowds lined the streets from Drury Lane to the Strand. It was more like a coronation than a premiere, remarked Lerner.
The film came next:
Andrews lost the part of Eliza to Audrey Hepburn. However, there was no doubt as to who would design the costumes and this time the sets too, ‘an explosive moment of excitement’, remembered Beaton – but it was not to last long.
For 10 months from the beginning of 1963, Beaton removed himself to Hollywood where, in the 1930s, he’d had great success as a photographer of movie stars. Despite a close friendship with Hepburn – ‘an angel of goodness’ – filming was an unhappy experience with echoes of his depressing time on The Chalk Garden. He quarrelled furiously with director George Cukor, whose approach he found undisciplined, his manner coarse. Further, his stage successes had emboldened him and he was unwilling to compromise. He also developed the habit, in breaks during filming, of taking the star off set to photograph her, sweet, pliable and willing, in each of his designs, her own and those of the extras. Already finding Beaton’s English vanities insufferable, Cukor was incensed at his presumption and at one point barred him from the set. Tempers simmered to breaking point. ‘Everyone’s nerves are explosive,’ commented Hepburn, ‘everyone’s on edge!’ Beaton tried to resign and in the end left the film earlier than planned. Meanwhile, Rex Harrison was positively beatific.
Regardless of what went on behind the scenes, it was another triumph for Beaton:
My Fair Lady earned Beaton two Oscars for costume and art direction. If the stage productions on London and Broadway made his name, the film guaranteed him immortality. ‘There is no formula for success,’ he once wrote. ‘The element of the unknown is always present to make or mar your effect; but when all the elements fuse and an entity is created, then all the heartburns seem to have been worthwhile.’
Royal photograhy continued
In the post-war years, the then-Princess Elizabeth called Beaton to photograph her first born, Prince Charles.
The aforementioned V&A article tells us:
On 14 November 1948 Princess Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. At her mother’s suggestion, the Princess chose Beaton to photograph her newborn son. Beaton would go on to take photographs commemorating the births of her other children: Princess Anne in 1950, Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964 …
Beaton photographed the infant Prince Charles on 13 December 1948, two days before the Prince’s christening. He commissioned a new backdrop for the occasion, which his assistants installed in the gold and ivory-coloured Music Room at Buckingham Palace. Beaton used a large 8 x 10 inch and smaller Rolleiflex cameras. He recalled that:
His mother sat by the cot and, holding his hand, watched his movements with curiosity, pride and amusement.
My favourite photograph is his official Coronation portrait of the Queen in 1953 with its magnificent backdrop of Westminster Abbey and sumptuous red curtain. The Abbey backdrop appears to be a large painting placed behind the Queen, although you would never know it from looking at the picture.
The Oldie magazine agrees with me:
Back at the Palace, the Queen was photographed by Cecil Beaton. She came in with her maids of honour, ‘cool, smiling, sovereign of the situation’. As she posed, he thought she looked ‘extremely minute under her robes and crown, her nose and hands chilled, and her eyes tired’.
To him, she was less forthcoming, but he extracted from her, ‘Yes, the crown does get rather heavy.’ She had been wearing the Imperial State Crown for over three hours, processing in the Gold State Coach through the rainy streets of London. Cecil Beaton went on to capture one of the most iconic images of the reign, way better than the official, tedious James Gunn portraits that lurk in embassies across the globe.
The V&A article has it in all its colourful splendour:
Cecil Beaton attended the ceremony, along with 8,000 other guests. He sat in a balcony close to the pipes of the great organ, recording his impression of the glorious pageant in animated prose and black ink sketches. After the ceremony he returned to the Palace to make final preparations for the official portrait sitting.
In this glittering portrait, the Queen wears the imperial state crown, a replica of that made for Queen Victoria’s Coronation. The Queen holds the sceptre with the cross in her right hand, balanced by the orb in her left. On her right hand she wears the coronation ring, a symbol that the sovereign is ‘wedded’ to the state. On both wrists are the armills, golden bracelets signifying sincerity and wisdom.
In the years that followed, the portraits that Beaton took of the Queen and her children are relaxed rather than stylised, a big departure for him:
Beaton’s approach to royal portraiture changed dramatically. All attention was now focused on the sitters, a stark white background replacing the elaborate Rococo-inspired backdrops of earlier years.
In 1968, Beaton was given an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He decided to add a new portrait, one of the Queen. I read in Tatler that he was mildly frustrated that none of the poses were what he wanted. Finally, spontaneously, the Queen suddenly turned her head at an angle. Beaton’s timing was perfect, and another iconic portrait emerged.
The V&A article says:
He felt anxious before the sitting, writing in his diary:
The difficulties are great. Our points of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part.
As times had changed by 1968, Beaton selected pared-down portraits:
Beaton selected plain white and blue backgrounds, resolving to be “stark and clear and bold”. The portraits were a triumph.
But — and its a big but:
They were the last photographs Beaton made of Elizabeth II, although he continued to photograph other members of the family until 1979.
This is, in part, because the Royal Family had its own photographer, Princess Margaret’s husband Lord Snowdon.
However, Beaton also suffered a stroke in the 1970s. Despite adaptations made to cameras and other equipment, he became more anxious about his future. Wikipedia says:
… in 1976, [he] entered into negotiations with Philippe Garner, expert-in-charge of photographs at Sotheby’s.
On behalf of the auction house, Garner acquired Beaton’s archive – excluding all portraits of the Royal Family, and the five decades of prints held by Vogue in London, Paris and New York. Garner, who had almost single-handedly invented the photographic auction, oversaw the archive’s preservation and partial dispersal, so that Beaton’s only tangible assets, and what he considered his life’s work, would ensure him an annual income. The first of five auctions was held in 1977, the last in 1980.[citation needed]
Cecil Beaton died at Reddish House in January 1980, four days after his 76th birthday.
Reddish House has had various famous owners since then and went on the market again in 2020, when Tatler told us:
… the smart home was purchased by Beaton for £10,000 in 1947, with the photographer living there until his death in 1980. He moved there from his sprawling Georgian estate, Ashcombe, which was just down the road.
A consummate host, Beaton threw plenty of soirées in his down-sized abode, with guests as illustrious as the Queen Mother, Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, David Hockney and Lucian Freud. Greta Garbo even moved in for a spell – staying for six weeks …
Not only did he add more rooms on the eastern side of the house, he also extended the parlour southwards and added new fixtures and fittings. Upstairs, the house had been fitted for illegal cock-fighting – Beaton made use of the cages as a wardrobe for his costumes for the play, The Gainsborough Girls. He also planted the gardens, that remain today.
The article has photographs, including another self-portrait from 1968.
Cecil Beaton was one of a kind.
Tomorrow’s post will be about another great Royal photographer, the late Lord Snowdon.
In his sermon on the first five verses of John 17, John MacArthur explains why the Gospel writer referred to Jesus Christ as the Word.
Excerpts from his 2015 sermon, ‘The Lord’s Greatest Prayer, Part 2’, follow, emphases mine.
As a point of reference, here are the first five verses of John 1 and verse 14:
The Word became flesh
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it.
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Here are the first five verses of John 17, our Lord’s prayer — the only one we have — in the Garden of Gethsemane for Himself, for His disciples and for believers to come. These verses comprise the prayer for Himself:
Jesus prays to be glorified
17 After Jesus said this, he looked towards heaven and prayed:
‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
MacArthur addresses John’s Gospel, the objective of which is to show our Lord’s deity:
He is the head over all things. The Father literally gave to the Son all authority.
John has told us in chapter 5 that He has authority to judge. He has authority to judge, and He has authority to condemn, and He has authority to exalt. He will catapult the ungodly into eternal punishment, and He will exalt those who belong to Him into the heaven of heavens, and He will provide by His power resurrection bodies for both. He is the One who gives life …
Now we know that that authority that belonged to Him – that sovereign authority over all things, over the entire universe, and particularly over living things, including even spirit beings – that authority was set aside in His incarnation. And He literally came down; humbled Himself as a man, as a servant; became like a slave. He was basically mistreated by the contemporary Jewish authorities of His time. He was executed by the Roman authorities of His time. And He is the One who has authority over all creation, over all humanity, over all that exists, over all that lives. Authority belongs to Him. Authority belongs to Him for a very important reason, and that reason is stated for us back in John 1. Let’s go back to John 1.
That authority belongs to Him because of a statement in verse 4: “In Him was life.” “In Him was life.” That is the foundational identification of God. This is the foundational truth of Christianity. God, the eternal God, is the One who has given life to everything that exists. He didn’t receive life; in Him was life.
Before going into MacArthur’s discussion of Christ as the Word, a relevant passage in Acts 17 — Paul’s brief trip to Athens — tells us that the Greeks worshipped an unknown god, thought to have been the god of creation. As creation is an enduring mystery, this god had no physical attributes but was the greatest of them all:
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 “For in him we live and move and have our being.”[b] As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.”[c]
29 ‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.’
32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ 33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
MacArthur tells us more about the ‘Word’ and the Greek ‘logos’, which means ‘word, reason or plan’:
“The Word,” meaning Christ, “was with God” in the beginning – “was God,” as evidenced by the fact that He has made everything that exists. Again, I say this is the definitive reality of Christianity.
“The Word” – Why isn’t He called the Lord Jesus Christ? Why does John use “the Word”? Because, among the Greeks there was this very obvious idea that there was an intelligent designer. There was a power; there was a cosmic force. There was massive energy somewhere in the universe, and it was highly intelligent because of the complexity of what it made. It was highly personal because there is personality among human beings. The Greeks were way ahead of the contemporary movement called “intelligent design,” which is a kind of contemporary answer to the foibles and follies of evolution …
Well, you would be one of the Greeks who would say there’s a cosmic force, and energy, and power, and intellect out there that is massive and way beyond us; and they actually called it logos, logos. And to the Jews, logos was the Word of God, the Old Testament; and God revealed Himself through His Word. So John just borrows that term from the Greeks and the Jews and said that “the cosmic force that you talk about, the intelligent designer that you recognize out there, that is the Word, the Word.”
And the Old Testament was God speaking, and now God has spoken through the Word. And then in [John 1] verse 14, he pulls that together by saying, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” The abstract, intelligent mind, power, force that created the entire universe became a man – the Word of God, the Word of God spoken in the Old Testament. Hebrews 1, “God spoke in the past, but has in these last days spoken through His Son.” “The Word became flesh.” That’s Christianity.
Now, the word “became” is very important in verse 14: “The Word became flesh,” ginomai. What does that mean? It means that the Word was now something that it never was before – it “became.” God is immutable. God is pure, eternal being. God is not becoming anything. God does not change. He does not develop. He does not progress. He is eternal, pure being.
But all creatures are becoming. They’re in the process of becoming, changing. Even the incarnate Christ was in the womb, and then out of the womb an infant, and then a toddler, and then a child, and then a young adult, and then a full adult – “maturing in wisdom, and stature, and favor with God and man.” At that point, the second member of the Trinity, the Son of God, became something He never had been. He became something He never had been – He took on the fullness of humanity. He was always God, but He became man ... Charles Wesley’s wonderful words: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus, our Immanuel [God with us].”
Eternally, God the Son – always God – became something He was not. He became a man “and dwelt among us.” He dwelt among us – not a vision; not an apparition; not some kind of esoteric, dream-like experience. He became a man. “He was made in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2). He partook of flesh and blood. He lived here for thirty-three years on earth, fully man. That Word, pure being, became a man. The rest of the gospel of John is to tell the story of His life through the lens particularly of His divinity.
… This is why He says, “Glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the world began. Because of who I am, I am worthy to be restored to that glory.”
First of all, He speaks of His preexistence. Verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word.” Verse 2 says the same thing: “He was in the beginning with God.” What is “the beginning”? “The beginning” is “the beginning.” “The beginning” is Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
When “the beginning” began, He already was. Do you see it? “In the beginning was the Word.” Was already existing, “the Word” – not became the Word. He wasn’t part of the creation. He already existed when the creation was made – already in existence. He’s not a created being; He existed from all eternity …
Let me make it simple for you. Something must be eternal – something; and not something, but someone. Someone with massive power, someone with massive complex intelligence must be eternal. I know it’s hard to think about things that are eternal. That’s really an impossibility for our feeble minds to grasp. But reason would tell you, to say nothing of divine revelation. Something has to always be there, because whatever wasn’t always there was made by something that was always there, and that something is none other than God. If you want to literally chop the bottom out of Christianity, just deny Genesis, just deny creation, just deny God as the Creator. That is not a small issue.
Since time began at creation, you go before creation. You’re beyond time. You’re into eternity where only God exists. So “in the beginning [time] the Word already was” – eimi, the verb eimi, “being.” Had John used gínomai, then we would have to struggle with the fact that he seemed to be saying Jesus came into existence, which would make Him a created being. But John doesn’t tamper with his verbs.
And, of course, Jesus said things like this: “‘Before Abraham was, I Am.’” And He refers to Himself as the “I Am,” over and over in the gospel of John. The apostle Paul in Colossians says that “He is before all things. He was in the beginning with God.” When “the beginning” began, He was already there. This emphasizes preexistence. He didn’t become God in time. He’s not some emanation from God, some creation by God. He preexisted everything that exists. That puts Him into eternity. That puts Him into the Godhead. Only God is eternal.
Not only was He preexistent, but coexistent. Go back to verse 1. He was not only “with God,” but He “was God” – not only was “with God” at the creation, but He “was God.” He is preexistent; that is before anything else existed. When nothing existed, He existed. And He not only was there “with God,” He “was God.” This is a powerful, powerful statement.
The Greek expression means “face-to-face with God on an equal basis,” “face-to-face with God on an equal basis.” Literally, the Greek says Thes n ho Lgos, “God was the Word,” “God was the Word,” full deity, verse 14. His glory was the glory as of the prttokos from the Father, “full of grace and truth.” He had all the attributes of God because He “was God.”
So who is Jesus? He is God, preexisting all that exists, coexisting eternally with God as God. And then this remarkable third element of His nature: He is not only preexistent and coexistent with God, but He is self-existent, self-existent. Verse 3: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life.” Really a defining, defining statement.
“All things that came into being, all things,” positive. Negative: “Nothing came into being that hasn’t come into being through Him.” Why? He was the possessor of life. Life came from Him. It wasn’t given to Him, it came from Him. He is the Creator. He is the Creator. Genesis, God is the Creator. Genesis, the Spirit is the Creator.
In John, the Son of God is equally the Creator. The triune God is the Creator, and nothing exists in the entire universe that God did not make: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated. Right? The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated, and only the eternal God is uncreated, so Jesus is the eternal God. He is preexistent, He is coexistent, and He is self-existent.
Theologians call this the aseity of God, a-s-e-i-t-y, the aseity of God. Nothing gives Him life; nothing takes life from Him. He is life itself. That’s why when God gave His name, He said, “‘I Am that I Am.’” No past, no present – “‘I Am that I Am.’”
Now you know who Christ is. The proof is that in Him is life – a massive statement. Not bíos life, not biological life; z, spiritual life. He has the life in Himself.
I found that a remarkable explanation of Christ’s deity, and I hope you do, too.
Churchmouse Campanologist 