CS Lewis died at his home in Oxford today in 1963, just after 5.30pm. His brother Warnie, who was downstairs, heard a crash, raced up, and found Lewis unconscious at the foot of his bed. A month earlier, he had written to a friend, ‘I nearly died in July and I have now resigned all my appointments and live on one floor of this house as an invalid.’ He died on the same day as the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, but the death of both men was eclipsed by the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, who was shot an hour after Lewis died.
‘All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.’ CS Lewis, The Last Battle
It is St Cecilia’s Day. Very little is known for certain about Cecilia, but the story is that she was an early Christian martyr, put to death in Rome for her faith around the year 180. Because her legend says she was ‘singing in her heart to God’ on her wedding day, she became the patron saint of music, and over the centuries, hymns, songs, odes and festivals have been created in her honour. The 4th century Church of St Cecilia in Trastavere in Rome is said to be built on the site of her house.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
WH Auden, ‘Hymn to St Cecilia’
Pope Vigilius was arrested today in the year 545 by order of Justinian, the Byzantine Emperor. He was in the middle of celebrating the feast of St Cecilia at a church in Rome, when he was seized and bundled onto a ship waiting in the Tiber, bound for Constantinople. The people of Rome threw stones at their departing Pope because the timing was terrible – they were under siege by the Goths. Vigilius was kept in Constantinople for eight years and died on the voyage home.
Etta Lemon, one of the prime movers in founding what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, was born today in 1860. As a young woman, she helped her father in his evangelistic work in London, but she soon became a campaigner against ‘murderous millinery’ – the killing of millions of birds so that their plumage could be used in women’s hats. Her work led to an act of Parliament restricting the trade in feathers, and she led the Society in rather autocratic fashion for almost 50 years.
The Christians of Rome elected one Pope too many today in the year 498. The Archdeacon Symmachus was declared Pope in the basilica of St John, while across town the Archpriest Laurentius was ditto in the basilica of St Mary. It took four years, several synods, and a lot of street fighting between fans of both Popes for Symmachus to finally emerge as the winner. Even then, Laurentius continued to rule as Pope over a section of Roman churches until the Gothic King Theodoric the Great told him to knock it off.
Image: Simon Jenkins