The grim irony of Walsingham

As you came from the Holy land
Of Walsingham
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?

The Walsingham poem used to be attributed to Walter Raleigh, which must be an error. ‘True love’ had a different meaning in his gallantries, most famously when he pleasured a maid of honour against a tree. She began by pretending to resist, but within brief minutes ‘Nay, sweet Sir Walter’ turned into ‘swisser swasser, swisser swasser’. The carnal and the spiritual can co-exist: see Dr Donne. But in its structure of feeling, the Walsingham poem is a couple of generations earlier than Raleigh: either immediately pre-Reformation or at the very latest just before Henry VIII had unleashed the full malign rapacity of his robbers and iconoclasts.

After they despoiled the shrine at Walsing-ham — one of the great pilgrimage destinations when Christian Europe was united in faith — it became yet another ‘bare ruin’d choir where late the sweet birds sang’.

In recent decades, there have been attempts at restoration, by both Anglicans and Roman Catholics, in easy cooperation. This has less to do with formal ecumenism by committee; much more with a shared gentle English spirituality. The religious might add some delicate insistence. Walsingham is a shrine to Mary, mother of God, Queen of Heaven. Marian piety, the Christ-child suckling at the breast: what better way to promote the meekness and harmony of faith?

Against that, there is a grim irony. Sir Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I’s head of the secret service. He took his name from a small and peaceful town where the surrounding countryside is a daily renewal of a pastoral symphony. His daily renewal was deceit, ruthlessness, torture and the scaffold. He crushed the Queen’s enemies, and those of the Protestant faith.