She forgave him. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
The Queen must have known that choosing Prince Andrew to accompany her down the aisle at Westminster Abbey would bring her little but condemnation. “Still a sweaty nonce” was one such response on Twitter, charmingly expressing what many might nonetheless feel: that such is the nature of Andrew’s extensive failures as a human being, he should have been locked away in a royal basement, not paraded before the country.
The Queen must have known. But she did it anyway, because though few people have any doubt that he is a total wrong’un (I don’t doubt it one bit), he is still family. Many families have rotters in their midst. And one of the most valuable things about family is that virtue is not a condition of membership. A mother can love her children, even if they have done terrible things — indeed, that is precisely the sort of dogged love many of us celebrated last Sunday. Besides, this was Prince Andrew’s father’s memorial service. Shamed or not, of course he had to be there. (Though, over in sunny California, the more virtuous members of the Royal family didn’t quite see it that way.)
In truth, I don’t much care for memorial services. The purpose of them is to speak well of the dead; literally, to eulogise. Such events work well for the powerful, the famous and the righteous. “A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself,” said the Dean of Westminster of Prince Phillip. Memorial services don’t require much religion either, which is part of their popularity in a secular age. They are sandwiches of hymns and readings and speeches — and songs can be easily substituted for hymns, poems for Bible passages.
In my time as a priest, I have buried a number of men (always men, as it happens) about whom no one has a good word to say. I have buried paedophiles. I have buried murderers. No one wanted to come to their service. The funeral was just me, an empty crematorium, and their coffin. The weakness of the memorial service is that it doesn’t work in such circumstances. There is no eulogy to be had here because there are no good words. Memorial services exist for upstanding members of the community.
But alone in the crem, undertakers having a fag outside, and armed only with the words of the Mass, there exists a kind of encounter with death, and with the evil that some people do, that for me at least is the absolute core of priestly ministry. Of course, most of us haven’t committed such crimes — but nonetheless, this still feels like the business end of the human condition. This is death as total desolation, without applause, without consolation. And of course, I pray for forgiveness, no matter what the crime. And for the victims of this person’s wickedness too. Which is why I often cannot myself forgive — that stuff is seriously above my pay grade. No, I will leave that bit to God.
There wasn’t a prayer of confession at this week’s memorial service for Prince Philip. Many would have loved to see Andrew perspire his way through that one. “We have done evil in your sight,” said my congregation together on Mothering Sunday. Some of us have more to confess than others. But confession and the search for redemption exists for those who have done great wrong as well as for those of us seeking reassurance as to the eternal consequences of our daily peccadillos.
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