April 23rd marks an important day in the English-speaking world. It is St. George’s Day: the national day of England. But despite America’s deep English roots and Christian history, St George’s Day has little presence in American culture compared to St. Patrick’s Day, which honors the (likely Scottish or Welsh) patron saint of Ireland.
It wasn’t always this way: the Library of Congress recalls Jamestown holding Olympic Games to mark St. George’s Day in 1691, for example, and the St. George’s Society of New York, founded on St. George’s Day in 1770, remains in operation to this day. Much of the group’s charitable work has an English flavor.
But who was the man whose name and red cross banner have united and represented the English for hundreds of years?
Not a Turkish Immigrant.
St. George was not an Englishman. Nor was St. Patrick an Irishman, nor St. Andrew a Scotsman. He was a Roman soldier, in fact, believed to have been born in Cappadocia, in modern-day Turkey, to a Cappadocian Greek father and a mother from the province of Syria Palaestina. He is believed to have died around 303 A.D.
In recent years, the political left have been keen to twist this knowledge to serve their own ends, attempting to accuse English or Christian patriots who wrap themselves in the St. George’s cross of not realizing their champion is a “Turkish Arab” or “an immigrant”. A quick look at history renders these arguments both facile and risible as a result.
St. George was neither a Turk nor an Arab. Indeed, the Turkic peoples did not sally out from Central Asia to begin their long conquest and colonization of what is now Turkey until hundreds of years after his death. The Arabs were equally alien to his mother’s homeland, with its Islamic warriors yet to emerge from their desert fastness. Their prophet Muhammad had not even been born by this point.
The idea that St. George was an “immigrant” or, even more bizarrely, a “migrant worker”, is still more ahistorical: the saint may have crossed the boundaries of the Roman Empire during wartime, but there is no evidence he ever emigrated to a foreign state, legally or illegally.
An example of some of the nonsense peddled on St George’s Day includes this missive from the far-left Kevin Maguire, once a senior editor of Britain’s Mirror newspaper:
Happy St George’s Day.
England’s patron saint was a migrant worker in what’s now Turkey so would be dumped by the UK Conservative Government in Rwanda if he sought security and refuge in the country.
Plastic patriots, reactionaries and racists waving flags must be proud.
— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) April 23, 2022
The Dragon and the Emperor.
What St. George is best known for, and most associated with in Christian iconography, is his slaying of a fearsome, man-eating dragon.
Most versions of the legend have the saint performing the deed in Silene, in modern-day Libya — though local legends claim the beast’s blood was spilled on England’s Dragon Hill, in Uffington.
Tales of St. George vanquishing a dragon as an act of Christian charity and declining both the hand of a princess due to be sacrificed to the creature and the wealth of the city he saved have thus far been traced back to the 11th century. The oldest stories of his life have a far simpler, grimmer character.
Though a successful soldier, possibly rising to become a personal guard to Emperor Diocletian, the saint lived during the time of the Great Persecution, when that same emperor attempted to stamp out Christianity by any means necessary. Ordered to do homage to the pagan gods, St. George refused, enduring torture and, according to tradition, decapitation rather than renounce his faith. Thusly, he became a martyr of the early Christian Church.
Why St. George?
Why the English chose St. George as their patron — like the Russians, Georgians, and many others — is a question generally little explored by those who seek to paint him as a subversive, multicultural figure.
Originally, England’s patron was St. Edmund, a king of East Anglia tied to a tree and shot full of arrows by Viking pagans. Like St. George, St. Edmund refused to renounce his faith.
St. George’s adoption as patron grew from tales from the now decidedly unfashionable Crusades, launched in response to the Muslims conquering the Holy Land and even besieging Constantinople. English knights were said to have seen apparitions of St. George. King Richard the Lionheart in particular was said to have been offered encouragement by the military saint in a dream.
The change was not finalized for some years, but throughout England’s history from that point onward St. George became a figure many from the country would call on in times of adversity and distress.
Most famously, Shakespeare had Henry V rally his heavily outnumbered men against the French with the call “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” before the Battle of Agincourt. As recently as the First World War soldiers from England claimed that the saint appeared before them and served as their protector during their retreat from Mons, Belgium, in 1914.
An Enduring Symbol.
Notwithstanding the leftist jabs and his day’s faded reputation in England’s former colonies, St. George is nevertheless an enduring symbol of support and national belonging to the English people.
St. George’s Day offers an opportunity for Englishmen to reflect, if not necessarily on the lands familiar to St. George, on their own nation’s history, and on its historic culture and values, steeped in the Christian faith and morality the saint lived and died by.
Many English pubs will be decorated with St. George’s crosses, and Jerusalem will be sung by the particularly observant.
Despite little official support and festivities often seeming to be actively subdued in recent years, many still feel great pride when celebrating the day, as well as the Englishness that it represents.
