Essays in Idleness

The year nineteen hundred and ninety-three was of some personal significance, for at least two persons. Ann Widdicombe became a Roman Catholic — which did not necessarily advance her political career in England. I almost became one, while my journalistic career, as publisher of the Idler magazine, was also characteristically failing. Indeed, in December of that year, my (notoriously conservative) magazine went “tits up.” By comparison, Miss Widdicombe later made it to the Privy Council, and was shadow Home Secretary. I admired her fearlessness, her Latin, and her humour, tremendously; though I was ashamed, for it took me longer to convert to Catholicism. And while I finally did that, when my Anglican wife kicked me out, I think the unmarried Miss Widdicombe has made it all the way to Martyrdom, for her Christian and conservative views.

Typically, in Britain, which has become another “shithole country” like Canada, the police tried to suppress the Martyrdom aspect of this news, immediately, though it was obvious from the moment Ann was beaten to death. As she had many secondhand books in her bungalow on Dartmoor, the Devon and Cornwall police naturally assumed she had been killed trying to resist a break-in, by for instance a secondhand book dealer. She was known to be very kind, rather intensely literate, but feisty.

It is this feistiness that is the mark of many, certainly the vast majority, of Catholic Martyrs. England began generating them in number as part of the triumphant history of the Anglican church, and “English eccentrics” have long been dominated by members of that country’s small Catholic minority. Indeed, the supply of Martyrs must dramatically improve, now that the majority of religious observers in Britain have become Muslims.

(Islam has been exceptional, creating Martyrs for every other faith in all countries they have tried to occupy.)

They may not be guilty of the murder of Miss Witticombe, however, if the police theory that it was “a white man” holds up. Perhaps it was just a Communist, or other progressive type.