A Day in the Life of a Travelling Author – What Legacy Are You Creating?

I recently visited the beautiful city of Bath in the UK. Behind me is the oak ornate West Door of the Abbey. As I researched the history of the area, I thought about what sort of legacy the ripples of our decisions leave.

After his fall-out with the church, my favourite bad boy of Catholicism, King Henry the VIII, created a church all of his own. He established the Church of England primarily because he couldn’t get a divorce under Catholic rule. Besides the divorce issue, there was another important distinction.

The Catholic Church recognizes the Pope as the ruler of the church. The English monarch, though, is the head of the Church of England. That was some power trip for King Henry VIII, who got a divorce and was crowned the Supreme Head of the Church. This was a massive cultural shift as the new church evolved. Gone were the days of reciting prayers in Latin. English was the order of the day.

Bath was at the time the second-richest city in Somerset behind Glastonbury and King Henry quickly targeted the Abbey. In 1539 AD, he decommissioned the Monasteries and retired the monks. Local leaders began removing the valuable iron, glass and lead from the church, causing it to fall into disrepair. It is the type of predatory leadership that crushes companies and countries.

It so happens that Bath contains the only hot springs in Britain and was a prime destination of leisure and healing. In fact, it can trace its history to over 2000 years as the healing capital of the nation. Many wealthy, yet not so healthy, people flocked to the town. Through the centuries, it remains commonplace for people who are gravely ill to seek spiritual comfort. However, having a broken down church is hardly ideal. Wealthy visitors were forced to attend sermons in the marketplace.

In 1574, Queen Elizabeth I promoted restoring Bath Abbey to become a parish church. She ordered that a national fund should be set up to finance the work. Bishop James Montague paid £1,000 for a new roof. You can see the Montagu coat of arms on the top right and bottom of the door carvings. Surprisingly, Psalm 133, carved on the door, is in Latin.

Now, at the time, only men had monuments engraved in Latin. Women’s monuments were engraved in English because the cultural norm at the time was that women were less important.

So in the end, the cultural norm showed that status was more important than honouring the break from Catholicism. Now, before, all the ladies reading this get their petticoats all twisted up. The romantic in me says, It was the love of one woman, Anne Boleyn, that was the true catalyst of this change.

It is said that King Henry III was influenced by the copy of William Tyndale’s ‘Obedience of a Christian Man,” which Anne gave to him. The book was first printed in Antwerp on October 2, 1528. The author challenged the Pope’s authority, which was just the view that the king needed to get his marriage to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, annulled. However, the author, who translated some of the first religious texts from Hebrew and Greek into English, was himself opposed to Henry VIII’s desire to secure the annulment.

Sadly, Anne’s influence was short-lived. She was accused, some say falsely, of adultery and was beheaded 19 May 1536 just short of three years after they were married.

Despite her untimely death, Anne’s legacy outlasted her brief marriage. Anne Boleyn’s daughter was Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 until her death in 1603. It was this queen who was the pioneer for the restoration of Bath Abbey.

For me, the lesson lies in the fact that the decisions we make in life have the power to shift the culture of our families and our communities… dare I say, even the world.

The question is… Based on your decisions… What legacy are you creating?

#writing #travel #bathabbey #legacy

Thank you Hush Naidoo for capturing this memory.