Without wisdom, wealth is worthless.

King Alfred the Great

I am English, not British. ‘British’ is the name of the barbarian Norman reinvention of the British part of the pagan Roman Empire. Since we are not barbarians, but Christians, we have nothing in common with those Frankish-speaking Vikings, known as the Normans. The latter, their invasion manned by the scum of Northern Europe and financed by anti-Christians from Rouen, made their Capital in London. They abandoned the English Capital of Winchester, where St Alfred still stands, calling his people to wisdom. In East Anglia we always called London ‘the smoke’ and the best place in it was Liverpool Street Station, because that was the escape route home. With this in mind, I invite you to the Suffolk that still resists the Norman Yoke.

At 8.30 I arrived at the north Suffolk home of the Benckendorffs, whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. On one of the hottest days of the decade, after a quick breakfast we left and headed towards the breezy cool of the Suffolk coast along the country lanes. Between Mickfield and Cross Green (if you do not know where they are, you have not lived yet), by a five-bar farm gate was displayed a very large board painted with the St George’s Cross of England, red on white, and written on it were the words: ‘The British State is the enemy within, the enemy of England’. This is how and what everyone outside alien and crooked Norman London and those who have not yet been corrupted by its mercantile spirit, have always thought.

This reminded me of the story of the visit of Tsarevich Nicholas II to Norfolk in June 1894. Staying with the future King Edward VII at his newly-rebuilt Sandringham, they had gone for a walk together around the Sandringham Estate. After walking what seemed like several miles, they realised they were lost. Coming across a horse-drawn cart and approaching the driver for help, the latter said he would give them a lift to the railway station at North Wootton. On boarding the train, the guard asked to see their tickets, and the King began to explain: ‘I am the next King of England and this is the next Tsar of Russia’. ‘Pleased to meet you’, said the guard, ‘and I am the Archbishop of Canterbury. Tickets, please’. Such are the people, not the pharisees.

The other link with a Tsarevich is Newmarket in Suffolk. In 1839, the Grand Duke and future Russian Tsar Alexander II visited England. Queen Victoria, whose real name was Alexandrina, in honour of Tsar Alexander I, threw a ball for him. Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, took him to the races at Newmarket. In Alexander’s honour, a new horse race was established — the ‘Cesarewitch’, the title of the Russian visitor. To this day, the Cesarewitch is an annual Newmarket race. And now they are building new homes there on the site of the former St Felix Middle School, built by the Edmundham company. We cannot get away from our local saints. They are always with us.

In the car we reached Framlingham, which was festooned with bunting and flags, especially the East Anglian flag, the red cross of St George and in its centre the blue shield and three crowns of our patron St Edmund, the Martyr-King. Then we went through mystical Rendlesham, where still stands St Gregory’s church, founded for the Kings of East Anglia soon after 625 AD in honour of the Patriarch of Rome, who had sent the mission to convert the southern English. We had entered the Sandlings, heathland and forest, with Scots pines, birches, ferns and wildflowers, heading for Orford, its Norman seaside castle quite out of keeping with its cottages, the roses and wisteria climbing to the roofs, hollyhocks, foxgloves and daisies in their gardens.

Here in Orford, all is cool in the sea-breeze. We stroll by the quay, visit a gallery, head through the town as far as the castle and then eat at the King’s Head, with its sign of St Edmund. He is said to have come here in his fight against the Vikings. Today we need his help, for we are still fighting the barbarian Vikings, though now they are called politicians, journalists and arms merchants.  We are reminded again of St Edmund’s heritage and memory: ‘The British State is the enemy within, the enemy of England’. I recall a naïve young man who wrote to me nearly twenty years ago, expressing his alarm that ‘the barbarians are at the gates’. I disagreed with him, saying, ‘No, the barbarians are not at the gates, they have been in charge for a thousand years’.

At lunch we speak of Debenham, the home on the River Deben, in mid-Suffolk, which so much resembles the little town in North Essex where I grew up. We speak of the difference between the Saxon and Anglian dialects of Germanic and how still today the Anglians in Suffolk pronounce the name of the boundary river as Stour (rhyming with tower) and the Saxon/Essex pronunciation which rhymes with tour. A similar difference is apparent in Cambridge, where those on the east bank of the River Cam/Ouse are East Anglians and drink ale, those on the west bank are East Mercians and drink beer, and have a working man’s club on their side. On the other hand, the City of Ely is all East Anglian, as it was in the time of St Audrey.

We speak of the 1959 novel Love on a Branch Line by John Hadfield, which the Benckendorffs have recently read. In it a bureaucrat from London is converted to the East Anglian way, rather as in the novel The Darling Buds of May by H. E. Bates. We speak of the nature of love. The Countess speaks to me of an elderly neighbour. Widowed, he actually bought the bus stop, which had been closed by the bus company, where he had proposed to the love of his life when he had been twenty years old. Every morning he walks down to it and sits on the bench, not waiting for the bus, but for the next meeting with his beloved wife. She tells me how she also knows a widow, who every Friday buys flowers and puts them with a candle in front of the photograph of her late husband.

We leave Orford for Claydon to visit the graves of Sophie (Shuvalova) and Constantine Benckendorff, the wife and the son of Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff, the last ambassador of the Tsar to the Court of St James. Last September we erected new crosses on their graves, where we wish to plant roses in their memory. We decide to turn for home by the country lanes, past the thatch, hollyhocks and roses of Suffolk villages, past Crowfield, White Horse Corner, Hestley Hall, Standwell Green, by the ripening fields of grain and rape gone to seed, still south of the village of St Dicul, the disciple of St Fursey at Burgh Castle and of St Edmund’s Hoxne. Here, on the back roads, lives Old Suffolk, part of the Old England that we love.

Now we are back home. The Count and Countess get out of the car and the Countess walks among the fallen petals along the path beneath the rose-covered garden arches which lead to the front door of their home and is greeted by her tabby cat, which she picks up, caresses and cradles. It is tea time; the Royal Albert chintz tea set is ready and cake too. We are home and over tea we discuss the project of opening a chapel nearby, in honour of the Dormition of the Mother of God. A building is at present for sale. I promise to speak to our Archbishop about it. Almost in the centre of the triangle of our churches in Colchester, Cambridge and Norwich, this is an ideal location for those who live further away than others. May God bless it.

Count Benckendorff speaks enthusiastically of the couple’s recent visit to Jane Austen’s House in Chawton and to Winchester. Jane Austen’s House felt so authentic for them and they saw her tiny writing table and family portraits. They felt they had been taking part in Pride and Prejudice. They quote from the novel: ‘It must be improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is known to have dreamed of her’. Then they had discovered Winchester, the City Museum, and had taken photographs of one another beneath the statue of King Alfred the Great. They want to return and visit more Hampshire villages along the valley of the River Test.

Finally, we turn to our next trip. We will start at St Botolph’s seventh-century thatched church at Iken as an act of pilgrimage, then on to mysterious Laxfield, and from there we can head to Lavenham and Kersey. Who said that Suffolk does not have hills?! In Lavenham I want to show them De Vere’s house, that is the home of Earl de Vere, whom many think wrote ‘Shakespeare’. I tell them of the oxlip flower, mentioned in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which grows only in parts of North Essex and Suffolk, which de Vere knew. As he wrote:  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

26 June 2026