4th October 1784
The autumnal light falls cold upon these stones, and I am humbled before the wreckage of what was. The old priory wherein I have made my habitation standeth as a testimony to the vanity of earthly dominion – its vaulted roof collapsed these forty years past, its altar overthrown, its sacred vessels long since carried away to be melted down for shot and coinage in the late wars. Even now, the very air seemeth thick with the memory of hammered bronze and iron.
This morning, I walked amongst the fallen masonry and discovered, half-buried beneath a mass of ivy and rotted timber, a great iron chain – such as once bound the monastery’s gate against intruders. The links are thick as a man’s wrist, yet Time and the elements have wrought upon them a corruption most profound. Where once they held fast, now they crumble at the touch, transformed to rust and powder. I held a fragment in my palm and felt the weight of Kingdoms rise and fall within that corroded metal.
It minds me forcibly of the great convulsions that have lately shaken the world. The Americans, having cast off the yoke of their rightful Sovereign, have established their independence through treaty but one year past. The newspapers that reach me – brought monthly by the pedlar who thinks me mad but not dangerous – speak of Mr. Pitt’s ascendancy and the King’s troubled spirits, of France’s empty Treasury and mounting debts. All the proud edifices of statecraft, built with such labour and adorned with such ceremony, prove no more lasting than this chain I hold – subject to the celestial scheme, which raiseth up and casteth down according to purposes we cannot fathom.
There was a time – it seemeth now another life entire – when I did believe most fervently that righteous government could be imposed by force of arms, that the sword and musket were instruments through which the Almighty’s will might be enacted upon recalcitrant peoples. I had read my Hobbes, my Filmer; I understood Authority as a thing descended from on high, to be maintained through strength of metal and discipline of men.
Yet these years of solitude, surrounded by the detritus of conquest and the ruins of holy places despoiled in the name of earthly power, have shewn me otherwise. I have watched the beams decay, the stones tumble, the tools of dominion – swords, pikes, the very nails that held the priory’s great doors – turn to naught but oxide and dust. What permanence is there in force? What endurance in the implements of compulsion?
I think upon the American rebellion – which I once deemed the blackest treason – and find my certainty much shaken. Perhaps there is a limit to what may be governed by the bayonet alone, a point beyond which the human spirit will not bend, tho’ empires marshal all their engines of war. The chain before me speaketh eloquently: even iron yields at last.
This is not to say I embrace the democratic passion, nor the levelling spirit that would overturn all natural order – God forbid such madness! Yet I confess my former conviction, that righteous rule might be perpetuated solely through military dominion, hath been tempered by observation and prayer. Authority that resteth only upon the sword must forever dread the hour when the blade groweth dull.
The broken bell that lies upon the chapel floor – once it called the brothers to prayer seven times daily – now serveth as roost for jackdaws and pigeons. Its clapper is gone; I know not where. Yet sometimes, when the wind bloweth through these vacant arches in a certain fashion, I fancy I hear still a faint resonance, as tho’ the metal retaineth some memory of its sacred purpose.
Is this fancy merely, or doth the unseen hand of grace work through even these corroded remnants? I am awestruck by the mystery of it – that what Man buildeth with such pride crumbleth, yet something persisteth beyond the material fabric. Not the stones, not the metal, but some essence that transcendeth both.
The sun setteth now behind the western wall, casting long shadows through the empty lancet windows. I shall light my candle – a stub of tallow, near spent – and continue my meditations. The world beyond these ruins is convulsed with the struggle for dominion, yet here amidst the wreckage of former grandeur, I find strange comfort in the certainty that all such striving is but temporary. The chains rust, the swords corrode, the tools of earthly power return unto the earth from whence they came.
And yet – and here is the awful mystery that holdeth me in reverence – something abideth. Call it what you will: the soul, the divine spark, the breath of the Eternal. It is that which no metal can bind, no force subdue, no empire govern absolutely. This, I think, is what my years amongst these stones have taught me, tho’ I struggle still to comprehend it fully.
May the Almighty grant me wisdom to perceive His design in this vast theatre of conflict and decay.
Late 18th century Britain, after the American War of Independence concluded with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, saw the new United States recognised and British politics recalibrated under William Pitt the Younger’s ministry. Monastic ruins across England dated to the 1536-1540 Dissolution under Henry VIII, when religious houses were suppressed, their lands sold, and many churches left to decay or repurposed. In the 1780s, Britain faced fiscal strain, imperial rethinking, and debates over reform while France’s mounting debts foreshadowed upheaval. The loss of monasteries reshaped social welfare, learning, and landscapes, while American independence encouraged later constitutional experiments and intensified rivalries with France leading toward revolutionary wars.
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