England will be rededicated to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ, on March 29th, 2020. This renews a formal public dedication in 1381 by Kind Richard II. His Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel spoke of the tradition of England being the Dowry of Mary as being even then “of common parlance”. We know of this idea of the country being dedicated to Mary – this reality indeed – as a matter of deeply held devotion, of historical continuity with England before the Reformation, of poetry and picture and song. The beautiful Wilton Diptych in the National Gallery is the most marked representation of this we have and a miraculous survival from those times. Embedded in history, in our own devotional life, in the story of our country, what has been the effect of the whole country being under her protection beyond this sphere? Has it affected and moulded our history in the fullest sense, in our laws, in our governance, in our customs, in our society? This has been little examined. The poet’s cry at the time of the Great War in 1914: ‘What stands if freedom falls? Who dies if England lives?’ begs the question – what is this England that it should live, that it must live? And when Winston Churchill in June 1940 said: “The Battle of France is over: I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions”, he was describing institutions shaped above all in the period when England was proclaimed the Dowry of Mary: Parliament, the Law, the Monarchy were all intrinsically formed in the centuries prior to the Reformation. How much of this depended on England being the Dowry? This has not been examined at all. It is a vast and speculative enterprise even to start to do so. But it may well be answered by approaching the matter from the perspective of our own times. For one of the motives for the re-dedication is of course the re-evangelisation of England; and, given her history, not so much to be seen as a conversion of England as its reclamation, its restoration to its true self. But how is that to work? How does the Dowry work in the public sphere? How and with what ideas or ideals, and with what purpose do we work from the private devotional sphere of the Dowry, of pilgrimages to Walsingham where the national shrine is, from our prayers and our practices to the public issues of our country? Do we do that at all? The general aspect of Christian witness, of individual formation by the example and aid of Mary, of pilgrimage and devotion stands clear and sure. But the Dowry is a more profound matter. It touches on the whole country. It is a question of identity. As Mary was the mother of God, and the second person of the Blessed Trinity was incarnate in her very person, so we must look to a similar “conception” in the dowry itself. It also serves as a script for our own public witness to Christ that seeks to imbue again – reclaim and restore if you like – the whole of England with the virtues of her son. Make England incarnate in its own nature the virtues and the “lyklynesse” of his kingdom. This has a general aspect – to understand our work in the public sphere and our evangelisation not just as witness in the heart and mind and soul, which is of course where it must start, but carried over into the public sphere. An exemplar of how this has and did work in history is the very compelling prayer of Admiral Lord Nelson before Trafalgar, where the public duty is predicated and informed by the private piety and the two flow together. The story goes that on the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson was found kneeling in his cabin, saying this prayer, which he also wrote down: