Truly it is a day to be remembered and remembered joyously for it was on this date in 1660 that Charles II of England, son of the blessed martyr Charles I, did on his thirtieth birthday day ride triumphant into London to reestablish the rightful monarchy after the overthrow of the military protectorate of that odious puritan Oliver Cromwell. The fact that I share a birthday with Charles II is, of course, all the more reason for jubilation.
High Churchmen everywhere and, given the fact that I am the only High Churchman left, even Anglo-Catholics ought to make merry on this day and thank God above that once there was a time when His Word was heeded and justice was done on this earth. If they will not then they show themselves to be no true Englishmen, but only the rank pretenders and fawning, pseudo-papists they were always taken for.
The name Oak Apple Day derives from the oak being a symbol of Royalist solidarity during the sickening protectorate of the damnable, filthy puritan Cromwell. After the Battle of Worchester, in which Charles II unsuccessfully sought to take back the throne of his martyred father from the blessed King’s murderers, Charles was forced to flee as a fugitive. Oliver “Not Worth a Flagon of Puke Puritan” Cromwell offered £1,000 for his capture and decreed, in between bilious, reptilian hisses, that any subject found aiding and abetting the King would be executed for treason. It was here that the Catholics and High Churchmen of the realm, defying the edicts of Satan, came together and truly came into their own. Over the next six weeks, Charles was secreted between various inns, houses, and estates, utilizing many of the hiding places and covert subversive networks that the Catholics of England had been using for the past ninety years. It was while Charles was lodged at Boscobel House and the White Ladies Priory that word came that the Puritan Orcs of the Dark Lord Cromwell were closing in on the estate in their bloodthirsty search for Royalists. The King hid all day in the upper branches of a mighty oak near Boscobel House. A Parliamentarian soldier even once passed below, Charles later attested, and it is truly amazing to consider that the raw, inhuman, animalish senses of one so bestial did not detect the King there aloft.
From there the King was spirited from one locale to another, narrowly escaping rampaging republican wretches many more times, until his eventual escape to France. Charles II never forgot the kindly oak that had hidden and protected him after the Battle of Worchester, however. Nine years later when decency, order and overall High Churchmanship were returned to England upon the Glorious Restoration, Charles II rode through the gates of London, his raiment bedecked with oak boughs and oak apples. Many triumphant Royalists who rushed to meet the returning sovereign were similarly decorated. I myself wear a sprig of oak in my lapel this day. I can go all May 29 without someone wishing me a happy birthday, but I will never allow Oak Apple Day to go uncommemorated.
Hear, hear, Alistair! I’m presently dining alone outdoors at 10 p.m. at a sidewalk cafe in Stuttgart, Germany. It’s an extraodinarily unfamiliar (and intriguingly unprecedented) circumstance for me. You have provided me with about the best proxy for dinnertime conversation I could have imagined.
Mind you, I think you mistaken at points (there is nothing pseudo about my papism, nor am I aware of anything simpering, closeted, or homosexual in my constitution), but such are the nuances and controversies best hashed out over beer and pipes. (Though I imagine that, a liter into the weissebier, we’d soon forget the theology and devolve into dueling Eliot recitations, the likes — and volume — of which would clear the surrounding tables of any timid patrons.
I have little to offer in interpretation of your dream, at least without further elucidation. Was the airship a dirigible, or were there propellers involved?
Now, now Dug, you Romanists were not at all the ones at whom my “pseudo-papists simpering in closets” comments were directed. Careful reading of my text will reveal that I was referring to Anglo-Catholics, not Roman Catholics, so unless you have hopped the Tiber and gone off on the Canterbury trail since last we spoke, you are safe from my ire.
Welcome to the blogosphere. It’s not exactly quill pen & parchment, but it’s all we who lack a publisher got.
Happy Birthday (anyway), High Churchman!
May your humor and prose inspire everyone to a Higher reverence in worship, and a greater dignity in discourse.