Calais

How ironic if Calais , whose command was once memorably described as “Christendom’s finest captaincy”, should as in the Wars of the Roses become a springboard, not for our conquest of Europe, but for the invasion of England itself. David Cameron must beware lest he should one day have cause to echo Mary Tudor’s plaint that the word

‘Calais ’ would be found engraved on her heart.

(Published in The Catholic Herald, August 2015)