CANTERBURY CALAMITY
Richard West on the sorry
agreement to build the Channel tunnel
Canterbury
THE Mayor of Canterbury, Mrs Hazel McCabe, and the four Tory MPs in East Kent, refused to attend the ceremony for the Channel tunnel agreement, signed by the British and French foreign ministers, witnessed by Margaret Thatcher and Fran- cois Mitterrand. The ceremony took place in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, on Ash Wednesday morning. In her speech, Mrs Thatcher read out some items of local history: 'Mr President, the Chapter House in which we now meet was once part of a great Benedictine monastery revived and reorganised in the 11th century by Archbishop Lanfranc, the first and greatest of the Norman Archbishops of Canterbury. Much of the work on the Cathedral was carried out by another Frenchman, William of Sens.' The Prime Minister made a coy joke about how Napoleon would have liked an easy access to England, then just to assure her coun- trymen that the tunnel was patriotic, she pointed out that her 'illustrious predeces- sor', Winston Churchill, had been an early advocate of the project.
The comments of Mrs Thatcher, or her historical advisers, give an inadequate sense of Canterbury and the long rela- tionship between England and France. Of course Archbishop Lanfranc and William of Sens were Frenchmen. So were all our kings at the time. The first Plantagenet, Henry II, who took the blame for the murder of Thomas a Becket in the Cathed- ral, was a Frenchman like his victim. The first King of England who mastered our language, Edward I, was also the first who paid more attention to our island than to his lands and interests on the Continent. But it was not till Henry VIII lost Boulogne and Mary lost Calais that Eng- lish sovereigns abandoned all claim to the other end of the Channel tunnel. As G. K. Chesterton said, the French and English who fought each other at Crecy had more in common than those who fought side by side at Mons.
Although the Strait was a natural obsta- cle, the English had far more connection with France than with Scotland or Wales, let alone Ireland. When Julius Caesar visited here he remarked that the people of Cantium were in constant touch with their kinsmen over in Gaul. This interchange continued throughout what are called the Dark Ages, so that the last of the English kings like Canute and Harald were linked by custom and ancestry with the invading Normans. They were all Scandinavians who had established rule over different parts of north-west Europe. England and France in the Middle Ages were not nation states but kingdoms whose power de- pended on feudal loyalty.
Canterbury lay on the route from Lon- don to Dover and thus to the great university centre of Paris, and Rome, the ultimate court of appeal on legal matters. Rome and, beyond it, Jerusalem were favourite places of pilgrimage for the Eng- lish; the lecherous Wife of Bath, in Chaucer, had made as many foreign trips as she had taken husbands. And Canter- bury, after the murder of Becket, became a centre of pilgrimage, greater than Lourdes today. On the 250th anniversary of the murder, in 1420, no fewer than 100,000 pious visitors came to Canterbury.
At the scene of the crime, a few years ago, the Cathedral authorities put up a sign to an exhibition of robes 'as seen on TV', also a shrine to modern clerical martyrs such as Archbishop Romero and Martin Luther King. I was in the Cathedral the day after the Pope was shot and was fighting for his life; there was nobody at the shrine. But when the Pope was to visit Canterbury I called at the Cathedral and was shooed out by a clergyman, who said the building was 'closed to tourists'.
The Reformation and the quarrel with Rome meant also a break with Catholic France, and soon the arrival of French Protestant refugees. Canterbury was the home of thousands of Huguenots who held their services in a chapel in the Cathedral crypt. They built up a silk-weaving industry which thrived until the competition of cloth from the Far East. The Reformation and spread of Calvinism in Scotland also meant that the Scots abandoned their 'Auld Alliance' with France in favour of coming to terms with their old foe, England. It also meant the estrangement of most of the Irish, who looked for alliance first with Spain, then France in the 18th century, the United States in the 19th century, and Germany in our own.
The final breach of England with the French came with their Revolution of 1789, in which the French exchanged their Christian faith for the two creeds of social- ism and nationalism, personified in more recent times by Stalin and Hitler. England too had her levellers and chauvinists. In the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a sour Can- terbury clergyman, John Ball, inflamed the mob to murder the Archbishop and slaugh- ter the Flemish immigrants. He popula- rised the glib and absurd slogan: 'When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?' John Ball was hanged. Today he would be a television liberation theologian, lecturing us on Nicaragua.
Charles Dickens liked Canterbury, which was the scene of much of David Copperfield, including the confrontation of Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep. Canterbury also appears on the escape route of aristoc- rats fleeing revolutionary France in A Tale of Two Cities — the two cities that Mrs Thatcher's tunnel will bring closer together by two hours, or so it is promised.
By meeting and feasting in the Chapter House on the first day of Lent, Mrs Thatcher and M. Mitterrand brought to our minds, perhaps unwittingly, how they differ from those who ruled their two countries when the Cathedral was built. A mediaeval king, to quote the historian John Harvey in The Plantagenets, `was not only a human personality, but also God's representative on earth; not merely a civil, secular power, for by his consecration and incoronation he received also the priestly function . . .'. A mediaeval king was ex- pected to give his subjects, in return for their loyalty, his protection, justice and charity. Mediaeval parliaments repre- sented tax-payers, not, as today, the tax- eaters. Yet modern leaders of England and France have not even consulted their par- 'laments on what is certain to be the most expensive and probably the most calami- tous item of public expenditure in the history of either country. The Channel tunnel agreement was signed without the consent and in face of the clear hostility of the people of Kent, expressed by the Mayor of Canterbury.
We can only guess at why the politicians now want a Channel tunnel. We do now know why the Labour government, in 1966, announced a go-ahead for the Hum- ber Bridge, which has beggared the rate- payers of Lincolnshire and the East Rid- ing, and could not begin to pay its way for 870 years. Thanks to the diaries of R. H. S. Crossman, we know that the Labour Cabinet advanced this project solely to help the Labour Party win a by-election in Hull. In the same way, President Mitter- rand pressed for the Channel tunnel agree- ment in order to help his Socialist Parry win more votes in the Pas de Calais region at last Sunday's legislative election. The political motives of Mrs Thatcher are obscure. The Channel tunnel is most un- popular in East Kent, which is anyway 8 Conservative region. Probably the Chan- nel tunnel is part of the programme she needs to create a boom before the next election. Already she has promised huge, spending on motorways and the building 01 bigger, unnecessary hospitals, to replace the small local hospitals that the public wants. The construction industry is the single largest contributor to Conservative Party funds. When Mrs Thatcher and M. Mitterrand finished their wining and dining in the Chapter House, did they pause for a moment to look at the Cathedral? It might have occurred to them that this colossal building was a construction project more marvellous than any tunnel, and one accomplished with only the simplest machinery. In sheer technological skill, mediaeval builders were far superior to those of today, who no longer can work . with stone, brick or wood, and cannot erect a durable building in steel and con- crete. Compare Canterbury with Liver- pool's Roman Catholic Cathedral, built 2u years ago but now needing more than a million pounds' worth of structural repairs' Just like Stalin, Mao and Marcos, our, western political leaders glory in physical monuments to their own vanity. While Mrs Thatcher has largely confined herself to building a new national library, President Mitterrand has already defaced Paris with objects such as the 'People's Opera House at the Bastille, a marble cube at La Defense, a pyramid at the Louvre and an Institute of the Arab World — which h. as not deterred the Arabs from murdering French journalists. Now Mrs Thatcher arlandM. Mitterrand hope to immortalise their, names with this megalomanic Channel tunnel. Their ancestors built the Cathedral at Canterbury ad majorem Dei gloriaM, _ the greater glory of God.
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