The following comes in the wake of a discussion about the difference
between the self-styled Orders of St. John and the real Order. For an overview
of the topic see here, this was followed by a closer look at the alleged Order in Russia, and next
when the remnants of the original Order settled in Rome in the 1830s to begin the process of re-organizing.
Because some confusion exists about the various "Orders" in England
and Germany I next will try to (somewhat complex as it is) entangle this by
taking a look at what happened there in the nineteenth century, and at the end
how it is now.
The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of
Rhodes and of Malta, in short referred to as the Sovereign Military Order of
Malta (SMOM) was founded by Pope Paschal II's bull on February 15, 1113. The
Order's motto is Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium
Pauperum (Defense of the Faith and Assistance to the Poor and Suffering).
Following the loss of Malta, as we have seen,
the tradition survived, and while not anymore functioning as a military Order,
a doctrine of sovereignty evolved that led to renewed emphasis on medical and
charitable activities. Thus today, in the age of the Red Cross, of the United
Nations, of NATO and other such bodies, multinational institutions have become
attractive. In many countries, the welfare state is increasingly unable to meet
constantly expanding demands for medical and other care, and in consequence,
the various branches of the Order of Saint John have acquired a role as
effective alternatives. This can be seen, for example, with the Malteser Hilfdienst and the Johanniter in
Germany or with the Saint John's Ambulance Service in Britain.
The foundations of the National Associations of the Order in England and
Germany in the nineteenth century have in common their roots in Catholic
movements of revival in Protestant countries, together with the parallel
appearance of two Protestant orders, the Venerable Order of St John and the Johannlterorden, which are now recognized as allies by the
(SMOM) Sovereign Order. In England, however, the early history of the
Protestant order is intertwined with that of the Order of Malta to an extent
that has not usually been recognized, so that it is impossible to tell the
Catholic story without the Protestant one; this marks a difference with Germany,
where the origins of the National Association and of the Johanniterorden,
though related, are completely distinct.
A bit of intrigue and a failed
attempt
The French knights gathered themselves again in Paris in April 1826 and
formed the Ordinary Council of the French Langues.
The object of some of them was to win a Greek island for the Order by mounting
an armed expedition, and to achieve it they were looking for two prerequisites:
money and the support of the Powers that would decide the fate of Greece. For
both of these, they thought it essential to establish links with England, and
their measures soon took the form of proposing what was described as the
revival of the English Langue.
The earlier Antonio Miari, when he took over
as the Lieutenancy’s chief delegate, decided not to attempt the recovery of
Malta, so as not to set Britain irrevocably against the Order, and the same
judgment was made by the French petitioners of the Congress. It was a question
therefore of what territory might be claimed as a compensation. A number of
possibilities were mentioned, but by far the most likely was the old Venetian
possessions of the Ionian Islands. These had been set up in 1800 as an
independent republic under Russian protection, had been ceded to France by the
Treaty of Tilsit, and reconquered by Britain between 1809 and 1814. The British
did not really know what to do with them (they eventually handed over the
islands to Greece in 1859 after forty-five years of protectorate) and were
considering various candidates to whom to cede them, including Russia and
Austria. There was Widespread public opinion that this was the obvious place to
put the Knights of St. John. We should also not forget that when “The Peace of
Amiens” in 1802 decided that Malta should be returned to the Order it was the
British, having their own geostrategic interests, who refused.
To understand the background of some of the personalities that made this
initiative we have to start with a bit of intrigue. During a meeting of French
Knights in April 1826 a few knights decided to withdraw, including the Bailli
de Calonne d’Avesnes and the Chevalier Legroing, who objected to what they saw as disobedience to
the Lieutenant.1 The majority of the knights continued, under the presidency of
the Commander de Mesgrigny, but even he seems to have
had nothing to do with the overtures to England; these were the work of an
imposter whose real name was Pierre-Hippolyte Laporterie
but who called himself Marquis de Sainte-Croix de Molay,
and a small group of his associates. Among them, the only professed knight was
the aged Commander Jean-Louis de Dienne, who by all
accounts was considered no longer in possession of his faculties. The
disruption of 1824 had thrown him into close dependence on Sainte-Croix, and it
seems that the link was fostered by the Commander’s nephew, Count Jean-Louis de
Dienne 2, In addition, there were two associates of
Sainte-Croix, the Comte de Feuillasse and Philippe Chastelain the latter who promoted himself to the dignity
of Comte de Chastelain. One also finds the name of
the Irish knight Dennis O’Sullivan, who had entered the Langue of France in
1783 and who was involved in 1827 in some unspecified capacity 3, These six, of
whom the prime mover at least was not a genuine Knight of Malta, were the
individuals who took it upon themselves to represent the Langues
of Provence, Auvergne and France, and for good measure those of Aragon and
Castile, in forming a new division of the Order in England.
This point can be supported by another deception that was practiced:
when writing to England on 23 June 1826, Sainte-Croix, earlier calling himself
Chancellor of the French Langues, declared that the
president of the Ordinary Council was the Commander de Dienne,
to whom he also attributed the rank of Lieutenant of the Grand Marshal.4
Clearly, therefore, he was not representing the authentic French Council at
all, under the Commander de Mesgrigny; Dienne at this time
was incapable of presiding over anything. Even less was Sainte-Croix
representing the Order’s legitimate though tottering Council in Catania, where
the Lieutenant of the Grand Marshal was Amabile Vella. One comment on these
proceedings would be pertinent: historians putting the view of the Order have
denounced the irregularity of the French overtures to England, but it is worth
noting that if Busca had not left the French knights
without an official organ of government after 1824 the misrepresentation
practiced by Sainte-Croix would not have been possible.
Nevertheless, the question of legitimacy is different from that of
intention. What Sainte-Croix was seeking to do was to establish a branch of the
Order that would in due course win ratification from the Lieutenancy, and he
was striving to promote a political project of which the Lieutenancy at this
time was completely incapable. If he had simply been out to peddle knighthoods
he would have gone to England himself, a step that he did not take until after
1830, when the Revolution in France destroyed the chances of a Mediterranean
expedition.
Sainte-Croix’s two emissaries in June 1826 were the Comte de Feuillasse and Philippe Chastelain,
sent to England to find influential supporters who would gain the government’s
goodwill. One may suppose that Feuillasse, as a
genuine nobleman and as a minor member of the French government, might have had
some success in finding the right people, but he returned home at an early
stage, and subsequent negotiations were handled by Chastelain.
The two of them initially made contact with a Mr
Donald Currie, who was to be the main link between the French and their English
offshoot for the next ten years or so. Here Chastelain’s
absurd incapacity for his task became apparent. The French thought that Mr Currie, “of Springfield”, was a Scottish landed
gentleman. In fact, he was a maker of military accouterments with trading
premises in London; but as one of his first services was to rescue Chastelain from a debtor’s prison in which he rapidly found
himself there was no incentive to study his credentials too critically. In
France, Sainte-Croix had always been able to gain men of genuine usefulness
(even if not of the best reputation) for his schemes, but Chastelain’s
recruits in England were frankly ridiculous. Nevertheless, the so-called
representatives of the French Langues signed with
Currie three” articles of convention”, dated 11 June and 24 August 1826 and 15
October 1827, which were eventually regarded as the basis for the English
Langue. Their initial purpose was to empower Currie, on commission, to raise
450,000 USD by private subscription to enlist armed men and buy weapons,
munitions, and ships for an expedition to Greece.
Currie did not succeed in raising much money, but he gathered a handful
of supporters over the first four years. In 1830 Sainte-Croix authorized him to
form a committee to revive the Langue of England. This met on 12 January 1831
and conferred presidential power on the self-styled Count Alexander Mortara. His rival was a clergyman, the Rev. Robert Peat,
who had been brought in by Currie in the recent weeks. Peat had been an
Extraordinary Chaplain to King George IV (an appointment that was less
exclusive than it sounds) and called himself Sir Robert Peat on the strength of
a Polish knighthood that he claimed to have inherited. Without going into
details, one can state that he was a distinctly bad hat. He may well have been
right, though, when in April 1831 he accused Mortara
of selling knighthoods and himself set up a rival center, with the support of
Donald Currie. This group expelled Mortara from the
Order, dismissing him as unworthy, but the Count continued to run his own
chivalric brotherhood.
In March 1832 the Rev. Robert Peat’s section complained, through Chastelain, to Sainte-Croix, who to their horror took the
side of Mortara. There were thus two rival Priories,
of which Mortara’s was recognized by “the French Langues”. In fact, as we have seen, the Ordinary Council of
the French knights was at this time in complete inactivity, and when it revived
in 1835 Sainte-Croix had no standing in it; the link between the English
aspirants and the French Langues thus consisted
solely in the spurious Marquis de Sainte-Croix and the spurious Comte de Chastelain. On 24 February 1834 Robert Peat allegedly
presented himself before the Lord Chief Justice and took an oath of good
administration as Lord Prior of St John in England. The declared basis for this
gesture was the Letters Patent of 1557 whereby Queen Mary restored the Priory
of England after its suppression by Henry VIII; according to the revived “knights”,
that legal disposition was still in force.
Sainte-Croix made visits to England in 1835 and 1837, and it is
interesting to read the description of him given by Dr Robert Bigsby, who was an initiate of one or other incarnation of
the English Priory: “He was a man of singularly refined and pleasing manners,
of a handsome person, and dignified address ... I never retired from the
conversation of any stranger with more regret.”5 Sainte-Croix, as far as one
can see, had by now given up hopes of a military expedition and was simply
enjoying his status as “Grand Chancellor of the Order of Malta”; this can have
been little more than a hobby, to which he devoted two or three visits to
England. While he was there in 1835, he repented of his previous decision and
transferred his support to Peat, whose position was further strengthened when
Count Mortara disappeared from England early in 1837
to escape a challenge to a duel. Peat himself, however, died that April and his
office as Prior was not filled for over a year.
These departures enabled the association of would-be Knights of St John
to move into a different and more respectable phase. Until now, it can hardly
be said that there had been an English Priory at all, whatever its legitimacy;
there were rather two rival groups, both of them with somewhat disreputable
leaders, and successively enjoying the approval of their originator
Sainte-Croix. Yet somehow they had gained the adherence of one or two men of
good position, in whose hands the affairs of the aspiring Langue took a new
turn. The most important of these for his activity was Richard Broun, who later
inherited a baronetcy. One might also note the above-mentioned plans in
reference to the Ionian islands.
This now took a curious new turn. Another curiosity was the Irish
baronet Sir Joshua Colles Meredyth
(1771-1850), who claimed to have visited Malta as a young British infantry
officer before the French conquest and to have been made a knight by Grand
Master Hompesch. That is conceivable, though unlikely
unless he represented himself as a Catholic. On the strength of it, he later
thought himself entitled to confer knighthood on a number of Englishmen.6 A
further recruit was Sir William Hillary, Bt, who had
been equerry to one of George Ill’s sons, the Duke of Sussex; Hillary assumed
the office of Lieutenant Turcopolier after the Duke had turned down the request
to head the Langue as Turcopolier.
Richard Broun, who had been admitted by Peat in 1835, had little idea of
the earlier history of his group. When he asked Currie for the documents on the
subject, the latter (who quarreled with Peat about this time) refused to give
them up, and when he died in 1841 Broun was only partially successful in
rescuing them. Broun, however, was responsible for a step which put the “Priory”
on a new footing. In July 1838 he asked Sir Henry Dymoke,
Bt, the Hereditary Champion of England, to join that
body as its Prior, and the offer was accepted. Dymoke
held the title until 1847 when he was promoted to Lieutenant Turcopolier and
was succeeded as Prior by Colonel Sir Charles Montolieu
Lamb, Bt, who was Knight Marshal of the Kingdom. The
would-be Knights of St John were delighted to have the holders of such ancient
offices among their members, and it reflects the inspiration of their society
in the mediaeval romanticism of the time – the sentiment that found
contemporary expression in the Eglinton Tournament – in reaction to the assault
on the old order made by the Great Reform Act and the growing industrialism.
The feeling was expressed by one of their members, Robert Lucas Pearsall, who
described what he saw as the virtue of the revival of the Knights Hospitaller: “It
seems to me to offer to the genuine old English Gentry a means of
distinguishing themselves from the crowd which now usurps their titles. Nor can
I believe that any Gentleman of an ancient family can look contentedly on such
usurpation, the more especially as the result of it must be to mix him up with
the ranks of the Lower Commons.”7
One may thus modify the hostile view of the prehistory of the Venerable
Order that has often come from the side of the Order of Malta. The origins of
the English body, as can be seen, are if anything more disreputable, and its
links to the French Langues even more tenuous, than
has hitherto been realized; but from 1837 onward there is little ground for the
disparaging account that has generally been given of it. Its members were now,
for the most part, authentic (though in various ways rather peculiar) members
of the upper class; but they had very little to do with the two shadowy groups
of the previous eleven years.
This brings us to the question of the validity of the English Langue, as
it thought itself to be, and the first objection to it is that of religion.
Since the two non-Catholic entities, the Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg and the
Russian Orthodox Priory, were both suppressed by their respective sovereigns in
1810, the Order of Malta has subsequently been able to regard itself (in
principle quite rightly) as an indispensable Catholic institution, and thus to
rule out the possibility of a Protestant Langue of England. In fact, the
records of this period point to a qualification of that view. As the efforts
for the restoration of the Order failed after 1814, its government began to
consider changes in the Constitution, among which would have been the creation
of non-Catholic sections. The Lieutenant Di Giovanni envisaged admitting
non-Catholic knights without obligations of celibacy, who would be placed in a
Langue of their own, and that policy was accepted by the Sacred Council in
Catania on 20 February 1818 (when at the Congress of Vienna the delegate of
King of Naples and Sicily to no avail protested the British occupation of
Malta, the grand magistry of the Order was transferred
to Messina and Catania and finally, in 1834, to its present location in Rome).
8 The fact that the policy was not carried out was the result of incapacity,
not of principle. Nevertheless, this decision must be called a measure of
desperation rather than a lead to be followed. As suggested earlier, the notion
of having a non-Catholic Langue, viewed as an organic part of the religious
order of St John, was not canonically
acceptable, and if Di Giovanni and his officers had had a proper grasp of
the point they should have ruled that any non-Catholic entities – such as the
Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg and the Russian Orthodox Priory had recently
been – were to be regarded merely as chivalric adjuncts to the Order, with
their own rules to make allowance for their non-Catholic character. That would
have avoided the danger, to which the Lieutenancy was also opening the door at
this time, that relaxations such as the dispensation from vows and from
celibacy would infect the Catholic part of the Order too.
The lesson from this is that the nineteenth-century government of the
Order might have been not only ready but too ready to consider the project of a
non-Catholic Langue. But this brings us to the next point, which is the very
concept of reviving the Langue of England. That Langue had already been
revived, as the Anglo-Bavarian, in 1782. It continued to be represented in full
legal form in the Sacred Council by the Lieutenant Turcopolier, Rechignevoisin de Guron, until
his death in June 1826. The two founders of the Langue died at about the same
time – Flachslanden, the former Turcopolier, in 1825,
and Cardinal Haeffelin in 1827 – but there were
certainly surviving members for some years afterward, including perhaps French
knights who had transferred as emigres to the Russian Catholic Priory. One
Englishman who joined Broun and his associates, Sir Warwick Tonkin, claimed to
have been received somehow into the Anglo-Bavarian and Russian Langue in 1830;
if so, he had a better claim to belong to the “Langue of England” than his
compatriots. One might mention also that the titular Grand Prior of England,
Girolamo Laparelli, was in possession of his dignity
until he died at Cortona in 1831 9; he, however, was a member of the Langue of
Italy. The implications of all this were that, if there was a question of
admitting English members, the correct procedure would have been to aggregate
them to the existing Langue. Sainte-Croix’s plan of “reviving” the English
Langue could only have been conceived by somebody extraneous to the Order’s
constitution.
The third point is that, obviously enough, nobody involved in the
project, whether on the French or the English side, had any competence to
create either a Langue or a Priory, even as a supernumerary Protestant entity.
The Prussian Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg and the Russian Orthodox Priory
were institutions which had the sanction of their respective monarchs, they
were endowed with commanderies, and their knights were noblemen admitted by the
authority of the Crown; they thus had an official status which permitted the
Order to acknowledge them, however anomalously. None of those features were
found in the body which began to call itself the Langue of England. If we
imagine that Candida had been Lieutenant before 1830 in place of Busca, he would probably have favoured
the French plans to conquer an island in Greece, and he might well have
accepted forming an English Priory even with Protestants – as a way of
promoting it; but he would have had to introduce special measures to make such
a foundation possible, and they would not have included the random co-option of
Englishmen attributing to themselves the title of Knight, Prior or Turcopolier.
From these considerations, we can see how remote the would-be
Hospitallers in England were from realities in the Order of St John. They were
further deceived by the bombast which Sainte-Croix had used in gaining their
support, and which resulted in the following account written by Sir Richard Broun:
“From the period of the General Chapter of the French, Spanish and Portuguese Langues under Prince Camille de Rohan, when the plenary
Capitulary Commission was constituted which revived the Langue of England, the
executive sovereignty of the Order may be said to have been exercised
exclusively by the six Langues of Auvergne, Provence,
France, Aragon, England, and Castile. Within that time, indeed, the formality
of electing a Lieutenant of the Magistry has been
kept up by a chapter of conventual knights, which at one time has been seated
at Catania, at another period in Ferrara, and latterly at Rome. But the
proceedings of this body, isolated as it is, and devoid of power as a
representative Council of the eight Langues, have no
weight with those preponderating administrative Councils of the Order in
Western Europe that constitute virtually the sovereignty.”10
Those words were written after the rebuff which will presently be
described, but in 1837 Broun and his confreres thought of themselves as part of
the Order of Malta, and were not aware of any rift within it. It was a sign of
their more respectable recruitment that they no longer relied for their
Continental contacts on Chastelain, who had now
become resident in Britain, or on Sainte-Croix. In July 1837 the self-supposed
Priory (currently without a head) sent two emissaries, William Crawford to
France and Robert Lucas Pearsall to Germany, to establish relations with the
Knights of Malta there. Crawford made inquiries in Paris and found that the
General Secretary of the French knights was the Chevalier de Taillepied de la Garenne. That
officer opened his eyes to the background of the events since 1826; he said
that the authority of the French Commission had been revoked by the Lieutenant Busca and that Sainte-Croix, who at this very time was in
England speaking with Bigsby and others, had been
accused of fraud (he may have meant the one relating to the Greek loan) and was
no longer a member of the French Council. From the point of view of
establishing contact with the Lieutenancy, however, the meeting did not take
things much further; let us remember that at this point the French knights did
not even know that Busca had died or that the
Lieutenancy had moved to Rome. The news of the current plan to establish the
Order in Monaco was further calculated to obscure the understanding of where
the legitimate government lay.
By December Taillepied was able to inform the
English that Candida was now Lieutenant, but communication with Rome remained
virtually nil for several years. What is strange is that nobody in France, or
in Austria where Pearsall got to know the Chevalier Neuhaus, was able to point
out the intrinsic impossibility of a body set up on the lines of the “English
Langue” being a part of the Order of Malta. Direct contact with the Lieutenancy
was made almost by chance; in the summer of 1843, the Bali Ferretti traveled to
London to claim a legacy to the Order deposited in an English bank. After
contacts established by the French knights, he spoke several times with Broun
and Tonkin and showed himself very pleasant, promising to do his best to
further the views of the “Langue” with the Lieutenant. Candida must have been
mystified by this newly discovered entity; it is unlikely that he understood
the details of its origins, and Sir Warwick Tonkin’s alleged Anglo-Bavarian
sponsorship can only have helped to cloud the issue. On 17 August Candida wrote
the English a highly apologetic letter telling them that he could not recognize
the Langue unless it revised its statutes to restrict membership to Catholics.
Richard Broun took offence at this rebuff, which the previous contacts made”
completely unexpected; he replied on 4 December that the English Prior and
Council “will have no alternative left but to decline to act in cooperation
with the Langue of Italy until a Chapter General of the Eight Langues shall be held.”10 This threat cannot have meant
anything to Candida and, if he had known its basis in Broun’s view of the
Order, previously quoted, he would have laughed. Not many months later came
Candida’s serious illness and eventually his death, and the whole question
lapsed for more than a decade.
For internal reasons, the body calling itself the English Langue almost
died out after 1849; activity was resumed as a result of a chance meeting
between two members, Sir Richard Broun and Dr Robert Bigsby,
in 1855. They still thought of themselves as forming part of the Order of
Malta, but their communication with the Continent was diminished by the
collapse of the French knights in recent years. Contact was restored, with
unexpectedly disruptive results, by one of their members, John James Watts
(1808-83), who had been received in 1832. Watts was a country gentleman from
the north of England, and he had little to do with his confreres after his
reception because he went to live in Malta. In the summer of 1857 the “English
Priory” took advantage of his residence to appoint him Commissioner to the Langues of Italy and Spain. Watts by now was acquiring a
better understanding of the relation between the English group and the Order of
Malta, and as a Catholic he wanted to join the latter. He went to Rome in June
1858 and informed the Lieutenancy about the body of which it had been given a
fleeting glimpse in 1843. Two details made Colloredo and his Council prick
their ears up: the first was the claim that Queen Mary’s Letters Patent of 1557
gave the English Priory continuing legal status, and the second was the
assertion that Peat had sworn as Prior before the Lord Chief Justice in 1834.
Lucas Gozze in particular saw possibilities of taking
advantage of this established English institution and linking it with the
Catholic Priory of England, which he already envisaged.
The basis of that plan was the reception in the same year of two
Englishmen as Knights of Justice, Edmund Waterton and Sir George Bowyer, Bt, the first to be admitted in that class since sporadic
Jacobite exiles in the eighteenth century. George Bowyer (1811-83) was a
weighty figure, being a Member of Parliament, and as a rich man he notably
promoted the Order’s work in England. Received into the Church in 1850, he had
the zeal of a convert, besides a markedly difficult personality. Edmund
Waterton (1830-87) was a member of an old Catholic family, of ebullient character
and enthusiastic piety. It was proposed that Watts should join them, and they
would form the nucleus of the new English Priory. On 25 June Gozze presented a paper suggesting that the Catholic Priory
should be formed first, claiming the rights under Queen Mary’s Letters Patent,
and the Protestant branch could then be attached to it. The Lieutenancy’s
relations would be direct with the Catholic Priory and indirectly with the
Protestants, and Gozze drew the parallel with the
Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg between 1763 and 1810. Watts was keenly in favor
of the union and was in correspondence with Sir Richard Broun about it. Gozze arranged to travel to England to carry it further.
The plan was killed stone dead, however, by Bowyer and Waterton. They
both had a fairly detailed, but ex parte, knowledge
of what had happened among the French knights from 1824 onward 12, and it made
them regard the members of the self-styled English Langue as a collection of
frauds. Bowyer, as a lawyer, demolished their legal claims, pointing out that
the Letters Patent of 1557 had no force without corporate continuity, and that
Peat’s oath-taking did not imply official recognition. Gozze
arrived in London on 26 August and immediately had this view of the case put to
him. The following day Bowyer and Waterton sent a telegram to Watts: “Hold no
communication whatever with Broun and his friends till we meet. Do not accept
their offer. When will you come?” Watts still wanted to rescue the
Catholic-Protestant union, but Bowyer and Waterton threatened to object to his
entry as a Knight of Justice, and on 1 October he wrote to Broun that the
negotiations were to be suspended and that he had been ordered to resign from
the English group. Though Watts accepted the decision, he regarded it as a
catastrophe.13
The “English Langue” had just published a Synaptical
Sketch of the Order of St John, treating Colloredo and his government as their
superiors. On 20 December the Lieutenant, Vice-Chancellor and magistral
secretary demanded that their names be removed from the publication, and Bowyer
was asked to convey a letter of protest to the Prince Consort, who had held the
Sovereign Order’s cross of Devotion since 1839. The English would-be knights
had already held a meeting (as it happens under a genuine Knight of Malta, the
Swiss Count de Salis-Soglio, who had been granted the
cross of Devotion in 1843 under the misapprehension that he was a Catholic),
and they voted that their earlier negotiations for recognition by the
Lieutenancy be revoked. From that point until 1963, the corporate relations
between the English Hospitallers and the Order of Malta were severed, while the
personal relations were sometimes acrimonious. One should not overlook,
however, that for a time the Lieutenancy in Rome had been willing to accept
this Protestant body as an associated part of the Order, and that the plan was
only stopped by two English knights who had a somewhat unfair view of the
society they would be expected to keep.
Cooler brains than Bowyer’s and Waterton’s might have begun to regret
their decision with the progress made by the Protestant group in the following
years. Sir Charles Lamb was briefly succeeded as Prior by Rear-Admiral Sir
Alexander Arbuthnot, but in 1861 the position was offered to the sixth Duke of
Manchester. The Duke, who was described by Disraeli as “silly but not dull”,
personally added little weight to his association, but he soon became a member
of the circle of the Prince of Wales, whom he persuaded to join the Priory. In
1888 the Duke gave way to the Prince as Prior, and Queen Victoria granted a
charter instituting the Venerable Order of St John in the British Realm. The
Order provides the anomalous example of a chivalric body authorized by the
Crown but whose knighthoods do not convey the right to the normal title. The
Venerable Order has gone from strength to strength as the controlling authority
of St John Ambulance, founded in 1887 and since then grown into one of the
best-known organizations for medical assistance in the country. In 1872 St John’s
Gate, the remains of the old prioral palace in
Clerkenwell, was acquired and turned into the headquarters of the Venerable
Order, where over the years an interesting museum has been developed. The cross
of the Order has been worn by many in official positions and the Grand Prior
has always been a member of the royal family.
The foundation of the British
Association
Relations between British Catholics and the Order of Malta were begun by
the Irish gentleman John Taaffe, a branch of whose family was also established
in Austria. Taaffe was received as a knight with his son in 1836, and, as
previously mentioned, he founded a commandery in Rome. It is interesting to
find that he wrote in July 1836 to King William IV and received a reply from
his secretary: "You have His Majesty's full sanction for appearing at
his levee in the uniform and with the
insignia of the Order of St John of Jerusalem."14 The first Englishman to
be admitted was John Webbe- Weston, of Sutton Place,
who was granted the cross of Devotion in 1840 on the strength of his descent
from the family of Sir William Weston, the last Prior of England before Henry
VIII suppressed the Order. These were exceptional appointments, and the
beginning of real interest in the Order in England was the entry of Waterton,
Bowyer and Watts in 1858, all of them as Knights of Justice; Cardinal Wiseman,
the Archbishop of Westminster, received the cross of the Order in the same
year. In Scotland Robert Monteith of Car stairs also became a Magistral Knight
and founded a family commandery.
Through Bowyer's patronage in the next few years the community of
Sisters of Mercy who conducted the Hospital of St Elizabeth in London were
given the privilege of wearing the cross of Malta, and their establishment
later developed into the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth built on the
pre-Reformation property of the Order in St John's Wood. Bowyer also built the
fine baroque church of the Order, originally in Great Ormond Street, and
transferred in 1898 stone by stone to St John's Wood. After a period of
quiescence, the interest in founding an English Priory had a resurgence in
1870, and five more Knights of Justice entered in the next four years;
Waterton, however, was by then married. Watts had made his full profession as a
knight but Bowyer had not, and his behavior in these years was
characteristically willful. When the 9th Lord Beaumont became a Knight of
Justice in 1870, Bowyer found himself outranked, and he probably realized that
he was too unpopular to be elected Grand Prior; his support for the Priory,
therefore, underwent a change. A further difficulty was a feeling in some
quarters that the founding of a Grand Priory by the Roman authority would be
bad for Court relations. The English Knights of Justice appointed one of their
number, George Errington, to represent them in Rome, but some of his confreres
doubted whether he was the right man to negotiate with an Italian, and he
displeased the Lieutenant with a scheme for starting a hospital in Dover.15 On
12 February 1873 the proposal was submitted to the Ordinary Council for the
creation of a Priory in England; the assumptions of the time were that it must
be an endowed foundation, and it would also imply a change to the Constitution
of the Order, since the Priory would be entitled to a representative on the
Ordinary Council, besides the four already existing. On 31 March J.J. Watts wrote
to Waterton describing the cross-currents in the affair:
We are working very hard in Rome to get our Priory established on the
conditions they have always insisted on to wit - six Knts.
of Justice, two professed (which we now have), three Commanderies of Justice
(two of which of £200 each will be forthcoming as soon as they consent to the
Priory - and the 3rd we have every reason to hope for very soon after) and one
Com. for a Chaplain (which is also waiting for them to decide) so we have done
everything they asked - and the result rests with the S.c.
[Sacred Council] and we wait for their resolution. Our brother Bowyer, I am
told, is intriguing in Rome secretly against the Priory and for a Congregation
although he headed the subscription in our supplication for the Priory. However
we all- the other five Knts. of Justice are resolved
to have the Priory or nothing. The S.c. boggle
horridly at the idea of having a little fresh blood let into their said Council
to alter the balance of it as they say - and small blame to them, for reasons
which are sufficiently obvious to you I doubt not if they wish to preserve the
present state of things. We have Errington, one of our new Knts.
of Justice as Plenipo. in Rome at present negotiating
matters.16
Watts was unaware when he wrote that Sir George Bowyer had already
killed the project with a hostile report, which he submitted in early March.17
On 28 April 1874 the Lieutenant issued a decree ruling that the Priory would
not be accepted, but, as had already occurred with the proposed German Priory,
which will be described next, it was decided to set up an Association instead.
The Lieutenant authorized this in December 1875 and appointed as
President the Irish peer, the convert 7th Earl of Granard, who held the office
of Master of the Horse. When the Association was officially formed in May 1876,
Watts refused to join it, as did others who had set their hearts on a full
Grand Priory. The Association as first founded was something of a curiosity; no
fewer than nine of its members were Knights of Justice (the dissident Watts not
included), and there were only eight Knights of Devotion, of whom three were
clerics of gentle birth. In its first decades, the knights of the British
Association were a mixed bunch, including Irish, Maltese and outright
foreigners. It was only after a couple of generations that it began to attract
typically descendants of the English Recusant families, proud of their martyr
blood.
In 1881 the Sovereign Order decorated the Prince of Wales with the Grand
Cross, which was conferred on him by Lord Granard at Marlborough House.18 He
did not hesitate to wear this emblem when he visited Malta as King Edward VII,
and, despite his concurrent position as Grand Prior of the Venerable Order, he
followed his great-uncle's obliging attitude to the Order of Malta, allowing
its knights to wear the cross in his presence. George V, however, withdrew the
permission and his successors have not restored it (see more on that below).
The foundation of the German
Associations
The foundation of the two Associations of Rhineland-Westphalia and
Silesia took place before that of the British, whose story has been told first
so as not to interrupt the English narrative. A prelude to it was the
restoration of the Protestant Johanniterorden, which
may be briefly described. The Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg was originally a
north-eastern division of the Priory of Germany established in the fourteenth
century, and at the Reformation, it did not suffer suppression but followed the
religion of its princes, of whom the most important were the Electors of
Brandenburg, later Kings of Prussia. The Grand Bailiwick retained most of the
characteristics of the Order of St John, including its commanderies, but its
knights did not take yaws or observe celibacy. In 1763, as we have seen,
Frederick the Great of Prussia made a gesture of friendship by nominally
restoring the Grand Bailiwick to unity with the Grand Magistry,
and even required the commanders to resume the payment of responsions. This
state of affairs was maintained until 1810, when, in the programme
of harsh national retrenchment after the defeat by Napoleon, King Frederick
William III ordered the confiscation of the commanderies. Two years later the
Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg was turned into the civil Order of St John. As
traditionalist sentiment gained ground in Prussia, Frederick William IV was
moved to restore the Grand Bailiwick in 1852; he appointed his brother Prince
Charles its Herrenmeister and set up a governing
council which consisted of the eight surviving members of the old Order. So
scrupulous was Prince Charles in observing ancient forms that he notified the
Lieutenant Colloredo of his appointment, in default of the Grand Prior of
Germany to whom that courtesy was formerly due, and Colloredo replied welcoming
the foundation as a bulwark against the baneful principles of the age. The Johanniterorden, as it is now known, thus enjoyed the
uninterrupted support of the Hohenzollern dynasty from the Reformation until
the fall of the German Empire, and even a personal continuity that links it
with medieval times. From the 1850s it showed itself very active in charitable
works, especially in the provision of military medical services.
In Catholic circles, the cause of the Order was taken up in the same
years by Baron August von Haxthausen (1792-1866), who
was already well known as a figure of the Catholic romantic revival.19 He
traveled in the winter of 1857-58 to Italy and spoke to the young Gottlieb von Schroter on his return from his quixotic journey to the
Holy Land. The support of the Prussian ambassador in Rome, who indicated that
his King would personally welcome the reappearance of the Catholic Knights of
Malta in his lands, encouraged the Lieutenancy to take up this new opportunity.
Haxthausen was received into the Order, in which he
soon became a Knight of Justice, and set himself the task of winning a
following among the nobility of the Rhineland and Westphalia with a view to
reviving the German Priory. His most active supporter was the blind Count Franz
Egon von und zu Hoensbroech
(1805-74), one of the finest representatives of German Catholicism in his time,
whose wife dedicated herself to aiding her husband’s efforts. In 1859 Haxthausen compiled for the Lieutenancy a report envisaging
the foundation of a Priory with a capital of 50,000 thalers (USD 14,000), which
would support two commanderies. With the recent memory of the Grand Priory of
Germany as a guide, it was assumed that the Priory must be an endowed body
enjoying public establishment in the Kingdom. The proposal was accepted by the
Lieutenant Colloredo in a decree of 31 December 1859, supported by Gozze in a covering letter to the German knights. From the
Order’s side, a minimum of four Knights of Justice was demanded to initiate the
foundation.
A meeting of noblemen was held at Munster in February 1860 to work
towards these objectives, but even from the beginning a party, led by Count von
Galen, was opposed to the very principle of the Priory. This school of thought –
anticipating what has been a characteristic opinion among the German knights in
recent years – saw little value in celibate Knights of Justice and aimed
instead at a society of Knights of Devotion without vows. But for the moment
the plan of a Priory prevailed and a Board of Patrons was set up to guarantee
the 50,000 thalers required. The next step was to gain the approval of the
Prussian Crown, and here the obstacles proved insuperable. As a leader of the
active Catholic party, Haxthausen was viewed with
suspicion, and accusations were made of Ultramontanism and Jesuitical
influence. There was prejudice in the very Protestant Prussian government
against a purely Catholic foundation and even, among ‘ burgerlich
‘ civil servants, against an exclusively nobiliary institute. The
Rhenish-Westphalian knights do not seem to have gained the ear of the King for
their petitions. Haxthausen was forced step by step
to a plan that would have made the Priory Virtually a Prussian national order
until Hoensbroech stepped in and denounced the
proposed statutes as incompatible with the intention of refounding
a branch of the Catholic Order of St John. In May 1864 Haxthausen
had to write to the Lieutenancy saying that the German knights were unable to
accept the government’s terms.
Filippo Colloredo, therefore, sent from Rome Gottlieb von Schröter, whose plans for a foundation in Jerusalem had by
now been repeatedly blocked. Schroter was given a
year to rescue the project of a German Priory; otherwise, it would be abandoned.
He took over from Haxthausen the leadership of the
Rhenish-Westphalian body and tried to remodel it according to his own
idealistic aims. He had in mind a group of Knights of Justice living in a
community and with strict observance of vows, while the Knights of Devotion
would be tertiaries, with the concept of “filial adoption” into the religious
order of St John. The ideas as far as Knights of Justice were concerned went
beyond those of the Lieutenancy, which saw them as turning the Order into a
quasi-monastic rather than a distinctively military one; in fact, Colloredo and
his Council had held back from sending Schröter to
Germany earlier and when they did so in May 1864 they regarded his mission as a
forlorn hope. Their reluctance was so entrenched that they even refused their
blessing to the German knights’ hospitaller activity in the Danish War
(February to August 1864). Hoensbroech, for all his
own high religious standards, was concerned to avoid a breach with the
Lieutenancy.
The death of Colloredo occurred on 9 October 1864, and there was an
interregnum of nearly five months before the international arrangements were
completed to elect a new Lieutenant. Schröter left
Germany in November, handing over the presidency of the Rhenish-Westphalian
knights to Count Hoensbroech. The latter decided on a
petition to Pope Pius IX, who was personally informed by Schröter
of the impasse to which matters had come. The German knights sent to Rome
Counts Schmising-Kerssenbrock and Schaesberg-Krickenbeck
(if we can really believe that those were the two gentlemen’s names) to speak
with the Lieutenant and the Pope, but they had less than no success with the
newly elected Alessandro Borgia. A communique even appeared in the Roman press
stating that the delegation of Knights of Malta from Germany had nothing to do
with the Grand Magistry. One may be surprised that
Lucas Gozze, who had shown his flexibility over the
aspirant Knights of St John in England, did not promote a more sympathetic
policy, but he had had time in the past five years to become irritated by the “laughable
misunderstandings Ii in the Prussian government which
had blocked progress. Thrown over by the Lieutenancy, Schmising
and Schaesberg had an audience with Pope Pius IX on
13 May 1865, at which Schröter was also present. They
had the support of the Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, who was
Protector of the Order, and Pius IX agreed to refer the matter to a special
congregation*. The outcome of its deliberations was that on 12 August 1867 the
association of the Rhenish-Westphalian knights was granted a papal rule as a
religious sodality. The terms of the rule made the body, in principle, an
independent corporation, and it was left to create its own statutory relation
with the Order of Malta. At a meeting in Germany on 25 September, the knights
agreed on a constitution for the sodality and elected Count Hoensbroech
President. *The interpretation adopted by German knights nowadays. That Pius IX
took a personal interest in the matter and supported the ethos of a pious
sodality over Ihal of a religious order. Seems to go
beyond the evidence: It is true. However. As we have seen. That the Pope proved
himself unhelpful at this time over the vocation of professed Knights of
Malta.
Early in 1868 Hoensbroech sent two different
knights to Rome to make arrangements with the Lieutenancy. After the deplorable
bathos to which relations had sunk in the spring of 1865, this seemed a
delicate mission, but the Germans had not reckoned with Alessandro Borgia’s
family traditions, in which deference to the Holy See was axiomatic. The bland
old Lieutenant gave them a friendly reception, and the smoothing out of the
constitutional questions proceeded with ease. The attempt to found a German
Priory, as envisaged by Colloredo’s decree of 1859, was recognized as a
failure, and the Rhenish-Westphalian Association was authorized as a union of
Knights of Devotion; it was simply asked to provide the names of the governing
council with which the Lieutenancy would have to deal. The delegates went back
to Germany and a first meeting of the fully egularized
Association was held on 4 June 1868.
Schröter was now dead, but his legacy
to the Rhenish-Westphalian Association was a high religious idealism which
found expression in its articles of foundation:
The members bind themselves by special and solemn promises to a Catholic
life in every sense, for their own persons, for their families and for those
who directly depend on their authority, and will do everything possible to make
their homes a mirror of simplicity and Christian living, renouncing all
distinctions so as to make themselves known only by their virtues. They will
strive in every way to conduct themselves not only as obedient and faithful
subjects of the holy Church, but as loving sons of this beloved Mother,
fulfilling her wishes punctually and without complaint, loving whatever their
beloved Mother approves and wishes, and carefully avoiding whatever she
disapproves. They will strive in every way to further the Church’s spiritual
and secular interests.
Since Our Lord puts Christian love before us as a beacon to our
childhood, and since all other virtues must derive their life and their true
worth from this same Christian love, the members of this pious association will
open their hearts especially to that spring of Christian life, so as to make
Him known to other souls through their example and through the life-giving
word.
The Catholic lands of the Rhineland and Westphalia belonged to the
western part of Germany, originally, for the most part, ecclesiastical
territories, which had been attached to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1814; the
eastern part of the Kingdom, geographically separate, included Silesia, which
Frederick the Great had conquered from Austria in 1740. Silesia had continued
to form part of the Grand Priory of Bohemia and had five commanderies belonging
to it which were not suppressed till 1810. Even after that date, the nobility
of the province kept up their association with Bohemia, and some of them were
admitted into the Grand Priory as Knights of Devotion as late as the 1860s. In
view of what the western knights were attempting at that time, there was talk
of founding a Bailiwick in Silesia which would form part of the expected new
Priory in the Kingdom of Prussia-“. The Silesian knights were active, like
those of Rhineland-Westphalia, in providing medical services during the Danish
and Austrian Wars. As the plans for the German Priory faltered, sixteen
Silesian Knights of Devotion founded an association of their own. They were
headed by the Duke of Ratibor, who, unlike Haxthausen and his friends, enjoyed the confidence of King
William I (later German Emperor), and he had no difficulty in obtaining
approval for the group, under his own presidency, through a royal order granted
on 2 February 1867. The Lieutenant Borgia recognized this entity in a decree of
3 May, stipulating only that it must call itself an Association and not an
Order, and this document constitutes the first official acceptance by the Order
of Malta of a National Association. Its membership was open to all Prussian
subjects; six German knights who had previously attached themselves to the
Rhenish-Westphalian Board now joined the Association, while twenty-four Knights
of Devotion of the Bohemian Priory also changed their allegiance. In 1870 the
Association had eighty-two Knights and twelve Dames of Devotion, and the
possibility of Knights of Justice lapsed into oblivion.
In the first general Roll of the Order, printed in 1871, the Silesian
Association is given precedence over that of Rhineland-Westphalia, whose
origin, properly speaking, cannot be placed earlier than the grant of the papal
rule in August 1867. Later, the Rhenish-Westphalian Association was treated as
the senior, assuming as its founding date the year 1859, when Colloredo
authorized the attempts to create a Priory. The convention is, at any rate, a
recognition of the fact that the first steps were taken by the western Germans;
but there is no occasion to quarrel over it since the two Associations have
been fused into one since 1993.
The two Associations in Germany were subjected to a severe test during
the Kulturkampf in the 1870s. The Rhenish-Westphalian Association, with eleven
members in both Houses of the Reichstag, was especially active in resisting the
attacks on the Catholic Church. Among the Silesians, the Duke of Ratibor, with his close ties to the monarchy, supported
Bismarck’s policy. This caused a rift in the Association, where the majority
defended the Church’s rights, and the zealous Count Franz von Ballestrem was soon to suffer imprisonment for his
resistance. When a group of knights headed by Ratibor
addressed a letter to the King proclaiming their support for the State, they
were ousted in the next elections of the Association, and Count Friedrich von Praschma became the new President. The minority continued
in a group of their own headed by the Duke of Ratibor,
but it was not recognized in the rolls of the Order. The schism was not healed
until 1891, when a compromise was reached making Ratibor
honorary President of the reunited Association. Praschma
retained the effective direction till his death in 1910, and he was succeeded
by Franz von Ballestrern, who had since, in the more
benign religious atmosphere that followed the ending of the Kulturkampf, served
for eight years as a distinguished President of the German Reichstag.
The restoration in Italy and
France
After being raised by Leo XIII to the long-eclipsed office of Grand
Master, Giovanni Battista Ceschi a Santa Croce recovered the other privileges
of the magistral dignity, including the rank of cardinal deacon and the style
of Eminent Highness. In 1882 he was recognized as having precedence over the
two Princes Assistant at the Sacred Throne, who until then had enjoyed the
first position in the Roman nobility. Leo XIII, whose distinguished reign
lasted until 1903, also transferred the ownership of the neglected villa on the
Aventine from the Grand Priory of Rome to the Order itself, and the Grand
Masters were able to refurbish it and use lit as a residence in early summer,
escaping from their somewhat confined premises in the Via Condotti.
They also gained the use of the beautiful prioral
church for the ceremonies of the Order, which since 1876 had had no place of
worship in Rome other than the chapel in the magistral palace. The status of
the Order of Malta as a fellowship of the European nobility visibly
strengthened at this time, and the use of the Order's uniform, which had almost
disappeared in the third quarter of the century, enjoyed a revival, the present
style of the uniform being adopted shortly after 1879. Relations with the
Italian monarchy were strengthened when in 1891 the Grand Cross was conferred
on the heir to the throne, Prince Vittorio Emanuele, later to be the King of
Italy.
Steps were also taken to provide hospitaller services similar to what
the knights had set up in Germany and Austria. In 1876 Prince Mario Chigi Albani della
Rovere, the father of the future Grand Master, signed
a convention with the Ministry of War for the creation of a field hospital for
wartime service. In January 1877 the Italian Association of the Knights of
Malta was founded with the specific purpose of organizing the Order's hospital
services to the army. It was thus different from the National Associations
which existed in Germany and England, and soon in other countries, whose
function was to incorporate the membership of knights as such, whereas the
Italian Knights of Malta were and remained incorporated in the country's three
Grand Priories.
Elsewhere there was also a reunion of the Spanish Order, and
establishment of the French Association. After it began to attract numerous
applications it was officially recognized by the Grand Magistry
in 1891.
Also in Spain, since 1872, the Order of Malta had more than doubled in
size and had added four National Associations to the two German ones Grand
Prior Alessandro Borgia had recognized.
Recent developments in
reference to Germany and England
As indicated above, the restoration of the Protestant Grand Bailiwick of
Brandenburg by the Crown of Prussia in 1852 was accompanied by an exchange of
courtesies with the Grand Magistry of the Order of
Malta in Rome, and relations between the two orders have always been friendly.
The Johanniterorder, was an order of chivalry under
the German Crown until 1918. Prince Oscar, a son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, took
over as Herrenmeister from his elder brother in 1926
and led the Order with skill until his death in 1958, since when he has been
succeeded in office by his son and his grandson, the present Prince Oscar of
Prussia. In 1946 the Dutch and Swedish commanderies of the Johanniterorden
separated from it and they became independent national orders, the Johanniter Orde in Nederland and the Johanniterorden
i Sverige, under the authority of their respective
Crowns. The Johanniterorden itself, despite the fall
of the Empire, still enjoys the recognition of the German government.
The emergence in England of the Venerable Order of St John, did not take
place under similar royal protection, but this was granted by Queen Victoria
after half a century, and the Order is now a recognized part of the British
system of honors. Thus the four bodies mentioned constitute the four official
Protestant Orders of St John, and in 1961 they signed an alliance asserting
their common aims and inspiration. At that stage, amity between the Alliance
and the Sovereign Order of Malta might have seemed elusive, because of the
suspicion that the latter showed towards the British order. As late as 1960 the
Grand Magistry in Rome tried to prevent its Delegate
for the Middle East from attending the opening of the Venerable Order's
restored ophthalmic hospital in Jerusalem. Such attitudes were changed by the
ecumenical spirit introduced in the Catholic Church by Pope John XXIII, and a
reversal of policy took place very soon. In November 1963 an agreement of
mutual recognition was signed between the Sovereign Order and the Venerable
Order, and the Grand Chancellor, Prince Enzo di Napoli Rampolla, paid a visit
to the Grand Prior, Henry Duke of Gloucester (an uncle of Queen Elizabeth), at
St James's Palace 21, this amity did not lead to full relations with the
British Crown, which continued its march away from the friendly attitude
towards the Order of Malta that it had shown under Edward VII and briefly after
the Second World War. Paradoxically, even though the Queen, as sovereign of
Malta, was in diplomatic relations with the Order from 1966 onward, when
ambassadors were exchanged with that country, the British government at home
has always refused to recognize the Order as a sovereign body, so that the
successive visits to the Queen paid by Grand Masters De Mojana
and Bertie have had to be classified as private. On the other hand, full
co-operation and friendship have long been the rule at the level of the five
orders and their respective officers.
The following came as part of a discussion with a former student when he
asked me about the Bobrinskoy Orthodox Order of Saint
John (OOSJ) and the alleged "The Sovereign Hospitaller Order of Saint John
of Jerusalem Knights of Malta" thus opening up what for me is a new
research topic. Self-styled Knights Of Today.
Where the previous part described the phenomenon of self-styled Knightly
orders of St John or of Malta, most of these orders claim to be continuations
of various alleged offshoots of what now appears to be a non-existing Russian
Orthodox priory. Case
Study: Malta and the Russian Usurpation.
In the following historical investigation it has become clear that the
original SMOM Order indeed continued unabated and that the Order's continuing sovereign
status was not forfeited through the loss of Malta. The appointment of a new Grand Master.
Following an earlier remark about Festing at
the end of the discussion here, there is
in fact a historical precedent in the form of an even more severe dispute that
more significantly gave rise to a vacancy in the Grand Mastership from 1951 to
1962 (which Roger Peyrefitte's famous novel
wrongfully attributed to a grain deal). Vatican's
opposition to the Order of Malta.
On the prehistory of the Venerable Order, the article by J. Riley-Smith,
"The Order of St John in England, 1827-1858" in Malcolm Barber (ed.)
The Military Orders (1994), pp. 121-38 is the first study by a professional
historian of a subject whose complications and obscurities had hitherto
prevented full understanding. Pierredon: Histoire Politique de l'Ordre de
Malte, by Thierry and Geraud Michel de Pierredon (8 volumes, 1956-2008), The origins of the German
Associations are described in Adam Wienand (ed.), Der
Johanniterorden, Der Malteserorden
(3rd edition). H. J. A. Sire The Knights of Malta 1996.
1. The statement in H. J. A. Sir, The Knights of Malta, p. 250, that the
Council of the French Langues was under the
presidency of Calonne d'Avesnes has shown itself to
be incorrect.
2. Robert Bigsby, Memoir of the Illustrious
and Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem (1869), p. 74: "A nephew of
the Count [the context shows that he means the Commander] de Dienne has been described as a hot-headed, obstinate young
man, spurning all 'legitimate authority,' and banded with a set of associates
disposed, like himself, to create a schism in the Order, by getting up an
opposition to the Roman supremacy."
3. Pierredon, Vol. 3, p. 40.
4. St John's Gate: Minute Book of the English Priory 1836 onward,
minutes of the meeting of 12 October 1837 quoting the letter in question.
5. Sir Richard Broun, Synoptical Sketch of the Illustrious and Sovereign
Order of Knights Hospital/ers cf
St John of Jerusalem (1857), p. 22.
6. Bigsby, op. cit. (see Note 2 above), p. 72.
7. St John's Gate: the Minute Book (see Note 4 above) is the source for
most of the narrative, the quotation being from Pearsall's letter of 1840.
8. Archives of the Order of Malta
in the Magistral Palace in Rome(OM): Liber Conciliorum
Status, 15 and 20 February 1818.
9. The information on Laparelli's date of
death, 22 March 1831, has been communicated to me by Signora Barbara Giappichelli Giannoni from the
burial records of the church of San Andrea, Campaccio
(now part of Cortona). The date 1815 that was formerly given seems to be a
guess which received an unwarranted general currency.
10. Broun, op. cit. (see Note 5 above), p. 30.
11. St John's Gate, Minute Book (see Note 4 above).
12. This is set out in Bowyer's Ritual of Profession of the Knights ...
of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, published in 1858, and Waterton's view
was very similar.
13. Notes and Queries, July-Dec. 1863, p. 190. Watts and another writer
contributed an informative correspondence to this journal in Jan.-June, pp.
201-4, 252-4, 270-3, 289-91 and 309-11, and July-Dec. pp. 190-1 and 212-14.
14. St John's Gate: copy of letter to Taaffe, 3 July 1836.
15. Mark Bence-Jones, The Catholic Families (1992), p. 222.
16. St John's Gate, miscellaneous letters: J. Watts to Edmund Waterton,
31 March 1873.
17. Records of the British Association, collection of correspondence
1854-98: extract of magistral decree of 28 April 1874 setting out the reasons
for the rejection of the Priory.
18. Records of the British Association, collection of correspondence
1854-98: telegram of Granard to Ceschi, 27 June 1881, the day of the
investiture.
19. The description of the foundation of the Rhenish-Westphalian
Association is taken from the
article by Maximilian
Freiherr von Twickel, Werden und Wirken der
Genossenschaft bis zum Ende des Kaiserreichs in Festschrift zur Hundertiahrfeier der Genossenschaft Rheinisch-Westfälischer
Malteser-Devotionsritter, 1959.
20. On the Silesian Association,
see Der Malteserorden in Deutschland, published by the
German Association of the Order (2011), pp. 62-4: Der Verein der Schlesischen
Malteser-Ritter.
21. Bulletin Official of the Order, January-February 1964, with a
facsimile copy of the joint declaration.
For updates click homepage
here