Elizabeth II at Her Coronation Service, June 2, 1953

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

D. The Monarchy In Peril

[November 30, 1995 marked the day Her Majesty the Queen attended a Service of Commemoration at Westminster Cathedral to mark the Centenary of the building of this spiritual center of Roman Catholicism in Britain. In doing so Her Majesty belied the declaration above as well as her Coronation Oath. Her attendance was intended to underline ecumenical reconciliation and unity. In fact it symbolised the continuing retreat of the Protestant identity of our nation and anticipated the likely imminent removal of the Act of Settlement and the resulting constitutional redundancy of the monarchy. It was the latest in a series of events in the ecumenical process that, step by step, was and is pulling up the historic roots of the Protestant Throne.]

1993 – The Year of the Maastricht Treaty and the “Annus Horribilis” – “Is it Time for a Conversion of England?”

“1993 may turn out to have been a fateful and historic year in the long tale of Christianity in this country,” wrote Roman Catholic columnist, Paul Johnson, in the Catholic Herald. “I am coming to believe that the days of the Anglican Church are numbered and that most of its worshippers will return to the true faith of their distant medieval forebears.”

Mr. Johnson and other zealous Catholic commentators had good reason for such confidence. In 1993, for the first time since the Reformation, the spurious sacrament of “penance” and the hearing of confessions began again within the Palace of Westminster. Previously the Roman Catholic Primate, Cardinal Basil Hume, had preached before Her Majesty the Queen, the first time that a Catholic prelate had done so since the seventeenth century. The protest of over two thousand Church of England clergy, who were concerned by the insult done by the multi-faith worship at the Commonwealth Day Service to the unique claims and inviolable supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ, was ignored by the Queen. On April 21, 1993, the Queen’s birthday, a High Mass took place at Westminster to receive Junior Social Security Minister, Ann Widdecombe, “crossing the Tiber” from the Church of England to the Roman Church.

There were other high-profile conversions that year and there have been several since, including most significantly the Duchess of Kent, the Queen’s cousin by marriage, as well as Princess Diana’s mother, Mrs Shand Kydd; Conservative Ministers, John Selwyn Gummer and Alan Clark, and the then Sunday Telegraph Editor, Charles Moore. All these conversions or desertions from Canterbury to Rome, in an ecumenical climate in which it wasn’t supposed to matter (and for the majority of people today it didn’t and doesn’t), had been very public and had received extensive press coverage. Without question, public opinion was being managed and manipulated by grossly unbalanced coverage of religious conversions in the media. An illustration of this was Prince Philip’s reversion back to Greek Orthodoxy from the Church of England which attracted no press coverage whatsoever.

“Annus Horribilis”

In that same year, 1993, the fortieth anniversary of the Queen’s reign and her “annus horribilis,” the prince of Wales’ adulterous relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles surfaced in the media. Mrs. Parker- Bowles was by then amicably divorced from staunch Roman Catholic, Andrew Parker- Bowles, “Silver-Stick in Waiting to Her Majesty the Queen”, and it seemed that there was a campaign in the press to legitimise her relationship with the Prince. It was widely believed at that time (1996) that both the Queen and the Prime Minister favoured changing both the Royal Marriages Act (1772), and the Act of Settlement (1701), so that the heir to the throne, if divorced, can remarry, and he or she can be married to a Catholic if that is the choice.

The departure of the royal family from their constitutional identity and duty as faithful Protestants had been seen in their fraternising with Roman Catholics. Prince Charles had attended Mass on more than one occasion with Catholic friends and was prevented from participating in the Pope’s private Mass only by command of the Queen. Princess Diana’s closest friends seemed to be Roman Catholics. They included Mother Teresa, with whom according to press reports, she has a special rapport, Rosa Monckton, wife of Sunday Telegraph Editor, Dominic Lawson, Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian Ambassador and James Gilbey of the “Squidgy telephone tape.” At the end of 1992, the tabloid newspapers reported that the Princess was taking instruction from a Dominican Priest, at a secret Oxford address, to convert to the Roman Catholic faith. With the Princess so open to such influence and with Camilla Parker-Bowles’ children attending Catholic schools, it is hardly surprising that Prince William very nearly found himself in the one house at Eton College with a Roman Catholic house-master.

Prince Charles had made it known that his allegiance was not to the Protestant faith, but to all faiths. It would be impossible for him to swear exclusively to maintain the Protestant religion in his realm given that by his bedside he kept a rosary given to him by the Pope. As the Sunday Telegraph reminded its readers in providing this information:

Maastricht and Monarchy – The Nation’s Loss of Direction

It was also in 1993 that the Maastricht Treaty was signed and the EEC became the European Union. This treaty effectively laid the Crown-in- Parliament at the feet of those who rule in Brussels. Despite John Major’s professed Euro-scepticism the reality was that, in spite of the opt-out, the Treaty committed Britain to ever-closer union, with federalism sure to follow. The conveyor-belt “process” of Maastricht, inevitably leading to total abdication of sovereignty, can be stopped only by the exercise of massive and unprecedented political will. Meanwhile the desired expression of the will of the people for a referendum has been brushed aside, and no amount of rational and passionate argument, nor warning signs, nor adverse publicity, nor bad behaviour or breaches of trust experienced with our European partners, seem able to restrain the compulsion to merge and abandon our independence and identity. The recent rejection of the proposed European Union Constitution by the French and Dutch people has made little difference to the process. The British people have had no say, and the EU Constitution is being implemented, by stealth, anyway. If the process is completed, and we are integrated into a federal Europe, sovereignty will no longer rest with the people of these islands, nor with their Queen, who will simply be a citizen of Europe like the rest of us; and her Parliament will be seconded to the European State. In fact all this has already happened. The reality is concealed from the people, until the EU Superstate fully reveals itself as a fully legal entity.

There is today a collapse of moral and political confidence in Britain and a loss of faith in our institutions the like of which we have not seen before. The Church of England, increasingly intent on following the fashions of the world and the lunacy of “political correctness,” has lost the trust and regard of the people and seems destined for disintegration. The police service and the courts of justice have repeatedly been discredited or maligned, and the modest proportion of corruption or fraud that has actually been detected in the business world is on an unprecedented scale. The young have scant respect for their elders, reverence towards anything is rare, and “there is no fear of God before their eyes .” (Romans 3:18) The mounting crime wave and the sheer nastiness of so much criminal (and other) behaviour are deeply worrying for all of us.

There is now no national consensus on virtually any issue, “one- nation” polity is impossible with no general agreement that we should remain a sovereign and united kingdom. Patriotism is widely despised and loyalty to our institutions unfashionable. The one great certainty that marked the fourth consecutive Conservative Administration was that the Maastricht Treaty, which seemed to have had most of the Cabinet and Opposition leaders mesmerised, had to be forced into law. Tony Blair and his “New Labour” government have carried on in the same vein, whisking the Amsterdam and Nice Treaties through Parliament and signing the proposed Constitution without consulting the people; and there is a sense in which events seem to have been orchestrated—so swift and relentless has been the assault on the nation’s institutions, not least the monarchy and the Protestant Throne.

The Religious Dimension

The predominant religion of the confederation will be Roman Catholicism and its spiritual head will be the Pope. At the time of Maastricht, among the European leaders who were most influential in furthering the federalist agenda were Jacques Delors and Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, both Jesuit educated, as well as German Chancellor Kohl and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales of Spain, also devout Catholics. These four leaders were products of the Roman Catholic Social Movement, which believes that “there is no nobler task than the unifying of our continent.” The concept of European Unity was championed by the founding fathers of the EEC —Monnet, Gaspari, Spaak, Adenauer, and Schuman. Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of West Germany, was Privy Chamberlain to the Pope, and declared in 1953 that “Germany had a divine mission to save Western Europe.” Robert Schuman, founder of the Franco-German Coal and Steel Federation, was the leading visionary, who pointed ahead to a federation of Europe. His cause for Sainthood is in process of advancement in the Vatican. The European Union from its inception, was an idea in the mind of the Vatican to re-Catholicise the continent of Europe and into the bargain re-Catholicise this country.

Departure from Biblical Christianity

When, at her Coronation Service, Her Majesty the Queen took the Bible handed to her by the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Moderator expressed that which lies at the very heart of Protestantism and at the heart of the institution of the Monarchy—the recognition of the authority and supremacy of Scripture:

Her Majesty then promised “to maintain to the utmost of her power the Laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed religion established by law.” Then laying her hand on the Holy Gospel she added: “The things I have here before promised I will perform and keep. So help me God.

Her Majesty, who at her Coronation promised “to maintain to the utmost of her power the Laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed religion established by law” visits Pope John Paul II, wearing black, which is symbolic of the Anglican Church’s submission to the Church of Rome.

In other words, the Queen committed herself, and the Crown-in- Parliament to upholding the statutes and laws of Holy Scripture and the Christian faith. However during her reign, we have seen the royal assent given to radical legislation totally opposed to Christianity as revealed in Scripture, and plainly fostering immorality. Bills facilitating divorce, legalising abortion and homosexuality, and “liberating” adultery and pornography laid the basis of today’s moral crisis in our society. “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3) There are signs that we are reaping the whirlwind of God’s righteous anger and judgement, so very apparent in the devastation brought about by collapsing family values, which have been experienced by the Queen herself.

Church leaders do not speak for God from Scripture as they once did, but God’s Word is not silent about what has happened in our land. What we are seeing unfolding at breath-taking speed is the withdrawal of the grace and blessing of God that many of us had come to take for granted as the inevitable result of our national apostasy.

The History of Christianity in Britain – Misrepresented

At his inauguration, Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, said that Augustine had brought Christianity to the British Isles from Rome. This is not true; rather it is simply ecumenical propaganda. There is a wealth of evidence that Christianity had taken root in these islands at the end of the first century, and saints of Christ such as Alban and Patrick were martyred or persecuted for the sake of the gospel centuries before Augustine arrived to enforce papal supremacy in A.D.596.

The rule of Rome was established after a century of opposition from indigenous Christians at the Synod of Whitby in A.D.664. The church in Ireland retained its freedom for nearly 500 years, and sent out another saint, Columba, to evangelise Scotland and Northern England from his community base in Iona. Henry II was commissioned by the Pope to invade Ireland and bring the Christians there under papal control, which was accomplished at the Synod of Cashel in A.D. 1171.

Britain’s Christian Heritage

Our forefathers who carefully drafted the Bill of Rights and the Act of Succession were at pains to protect and defend the Biblical Christianity rediscovered at the Reformation and thus consolidate the basis of our parliamentary and individual freedoms. They saw the Roman Papacy as a proven threat to the safety and liberty of the realm and the practice of Roman Catholicism as an affront to true New Testament Christianity. This was apparent in the Sovereign’s Coronation Oath sworn by every monarch up to the time of King George V:

At that time, memories of the burning of godly men, who would not compromise their faith in Christ and the infallibility of Scripture (such as Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford and George Wishart in Scotland), were still precious to the majority of the people and their children at school. Relativism had not taken root, nor had tolerance stretched the bounds of morality beyond the limits of Scripture. Truth really mattered. Our great Christian heritage, firmly guarded by the national church and enshrined in the 39 Articles and the other great Protestant Confessions of faith, was treasured by the whole nation. Reminders of the wonderful deliverances from papal power were included in the Prayer Book, and are still to be found in the preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible.

England had repeatedly experienced plots, conspiracies and assaults against both Throne and State carried out by the Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Ridolphi Plot, the Babington Plot, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, and numerous other attempts to advance popery during the time of the Stuart kings culminated in the “Glorious” and bloodless Revolution and to the securing of the Protestant Throne in 1688.

The Jesuits, ever zealous in their conviction that the end, of establishing the rule of Rome, justifies whatever the means, went underground. They were banned from nearly every country in Europe including our own, until they were able to re-emerge just before the launch of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s. The success of the Tractarians and the man described by previous popes as the founder of the ecumenical movement, Cardinal John Henry Newman, in building up the “High Church” or Roman Catholic wing of the Church of England, sowed the seeds for the departure of the denominational structures from true Christianity in the twentieth century. Vatican II, in the early 1960s, convinced and continues to convince many Protestants that Roman Catholicism had changed and was looking for agreement and compromise. This is not so. Cardinal Basil Hume claimed that the Roman Church “possesses all of God’s revealed truth and all the means of grace and will not accord that status to others.” Gullible Christians longing for unity have swallowed a red herring. The dogmas of the council of Trent, which pronounced anathemas on “the heretics” of the Protestant Reformation, were upheld by Vatican II. The language has changed but not the substance. Protestants have become “separated brethren”, but “subsidiarity,” a Jesuitical term of “Vaticanspeak” first used in the pontificate of Pius XI early in the last century, can mean whatever those at the center of power choose it to mean. “The single market” and the “social chapter” are also concepts that derive from Roman Catholic social thinking. This does not bode well for our future freedoms.

The Faith that Made Britain Great

As a nation we have turned our backs on God and denied and squandered our great Christian heritage—the faith that won us the freedom to read the Bible (and indeed any other book) and that so many martyrs sacrificed their lives to defend; the religion that sent missionaries out to all comers of the world, winning countless souls and laying the foundation of the greatest empire the world has known; the Christianity that withstood the constant threat of papal Rome and gave us our Protestant Reformed Throne and national identity. That faith given to us by the grace of God maintained the freedom and safety of the realm. Under King George VI, when that freedom was threatened by Nazi Germany, the nation was repeatedly called to prayer. Several times during the Second World War, just as at the time of the Spanish Armada, “the people of the book” cried out to Almighty God for His deliverance. He has always answered the nation’s prayers and these islands have long been free from invasion by an alien power.

The Way Forward

As the government continues to yield powers to Brussels in the Maastricht “process;” as the proposed Constitution is implemented without the people’s consent; as the Monarchy and the established Church together with their shared Protestant Reformed identity crumble; and as the moral landslide gathers momentum; once again as a nation we need to repent and cry out to Almighty God for mercy and deliverance. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Prov. 29:18) We need to look to Scripture to rediscover, as the Reformers did, the simplicity of the Gospel, repentance and the promise of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. … There is no fear of God before their eyes. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;.” (Romans 3:10-12, 18, 23-25)

Martin Luther, who saw corruption and depravity all around him, found the answer of individual salvation, free and totally unearned, which in the past has resulted in corporate and national blessing, in such verses of Scripture from the third chapter of the book of Romans.

For those who understand what God has done for this nation in the past, the implications of Parliament’s decisions to sign both the Treaty of Rome and the Treaty of Maastricht transcend economic considerations. In addition, the prospect of revision of the Coronation Oath, as well as of the Act of Settlement and the Royal Marriages Act, threatens to further undermine our national identity, as well as the freedoms that we cherish. It is imperative that we remember the lessons of history and respect the prudence of our forefathers in protecting posterity. “O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old.” (Psalms 44:1) Let us pray that God will stay the hand of the politicians, and grant the people of the British Isles the opportunity to decide these things; and in His mercy He will give them the wisdom to once more “ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.” (Jeremiah 6:16)

I was raised in a Lutheran church, but it was not until I was about 23, and read “Steps to Peace with God”, a tract by Billy Graham, that I desired to know the Lord Jesus Christ. I went through the “steps” and began my life with Christ.

Throughout my walk, I always had a fear of God, as I was raised with that, and I always wanted to please Him. However, I also thought of Jesus as my friend, causing my relationship to be casual. Something was missing—a certain intimacy was just not there. There was no desperation to know Him—there was no hunger for His Word—I would read it, simply because I knew that I should, but I would get nothing from it. I presumed that somehow this was my fault—I must have had some great sin that was in the way. I began to ask the Lord to show me what I had done and why I was not desperate.

One night, not long ago, I went to the home of a fellow sister in the Lord to study the Word together, and, while she had been called to the telephone, I asked the Lord again to show me what was wrong. He showed me myself in a fire, and His pulling me out. I thought of Zechariah 3:2, which says in part, “…is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” I was horrified at my response, which I saw next. Saying, “Thanks, Lord,” I stood up, brushed myself off, and went on my merry way. This was much too casual. I could see that there was pride there, but I didn’t know the root of it. Still I knew that somehow, this was at the heart of that which was the obstacle.

From this point on, I thought I needed a revelation of hell—a fuller understanding of what I had been saved from. I began to pray earnestly for this. What I received instead was a revelation of the cross.

I suddenly had part of what I’d asked for—a hunger for the Word of God. I began to read the gospel according to John, where I began to “hear” the doctrine of election coming through. I understand that I did not save myself, and my salvation had nothing at all to do with the “steps” I had followed back when I was 23. Once I understood this, the Word opened up even more, and I began to see more. James 4:6, which says in part, “…God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.” suddenly opened up to me, and I understood what that meant as well.

I understood that even repentance wasn’t possible without Him, as He had to first show me what I needed to repent of, He had to turn my heart to Him in brokenness. It was His goodness that led to my repentance, as it says in Romans 2:4 (“…the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance…”). This was what I needed to finally destroy my pride and rid myself of any notion that I had saved myself.

In my life I have gotten married, I have given birth to children, I have lost a parent, I have “walked” with the Lord Jesus for fourteen years, but nothing has ever impacted my life as knowing that He chose me. Knowing He is sovereign assures me that He WILL do all that He has promised. I know that He doesn’t have to depend upon me for anything—not even to respond toward my own salvation— and this gives me peace I have never known.

Nothing in my life will ever be the same.

Acknowledgements

This book has taken a long time to write. It grew out of ‘All’s Well’ or Sound the Alarm, a booklet about the wellbeing of the church which was distributed in the early 1990s. I want to thank the many supporters of Spirit of ‘88/ Dorchester House Publications and others who offered suggestions and constructive criticism and have given much encouragement over the years. Most especially, I would like to thank Ralph Brockman and Jean Shepherd who have faithfully prayed throughout that time.

I would also like to single out Richard Bennett, a special brother in the Lord, who has helped me a great deal on a number of issues. Also to Lynn, Richard’s wife, who has given me wise advice and much encouragement as well. I owe a lot, too, to Derek Owers, who had much to do with the writing of the third section of the book.

For editing the text I am extremely grateful to Barbara Merz (and members of her church) who also so willingly helped me a great deal with research. Without Barbara’s help, it is difficult to know by when I could have finished this book.

Michael de Semlyen

September 2006

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