Eat your heart out, Da Vinci Code. The leafy lanes of St John’s Wood have become the setting for a real-life Catholic intrigue that could have slipped from the pages of a Dan Brown novel.
Shortly after it was founded in 1856, the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth was put under the protection of the Knights of Malta, the world’s oldest surviving order of chivalry. The power has now flipped. The hospital owns the chapel in which the Knights have historically worshipped but as of Monday their dark, swirling cloaks may lose many of their rights.
Lord Guthrie, former head of the British armed forces and now chair of the hospital’s trustees, will lead the charge to change the constitution of the chapel. “The Knights will no longer have the same position,” Guthrie tells The Londoner. “They used the chapel but they didn’t contribute to the life of it. The changes will reflect that.”
The tensions between the two parties have been building since the hospital banned three Knights from the chapel for failing to carry out the necessary child-protection procedures. There are rumbles from the rest of the Order, led by their Grand Master Matthew Festing, that this is a move to de-Catholicise the hospital.
One of the Knights said an attempt at reconciliation last week ended in Lord Guthrie losing his temper and objects being thrown during the meeting. However, Lord Guthrie, who was himself former vice-president of the Order of Malta, recalls the meeting quiet differently. “There were certainly no raised tempers on the hospital’s side,” he pointedly remarked.
