To Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second,
Buckingham Palace, London S.W.1.
May It Please Your Majesty,
This Annual Meeting of the Bible Christian Unity Fellowship, held in London on Tuesday, 1st May 1979, whose members hold the Bible to be the Inspired and Inerrant Word of God and sole rule of Faith and Practice — have learned with the greatest grief that, according to the Roman Catholic Press, Your Majesty is intending to visit the Roman Catholic flower show in Westminster Cathedral on July 13th 1979.
We humbly submit that this action is to ignore the spirit and letter of the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement prohibiting communion with the Church of Rome. We are persuaded that our distress is shared by countless numbers of Bible-believing and loyal Protestant subjects throughout the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth.
We and they cannot forget that many of the Popes and their Church tortured (especially in the halls of the Inquisition), burnt alive or by crusades and warfare brought to an early and cruel death millions of the most law-abiding and blameless men and women simply because they had read their Bibles and felt that its holy teachings were diametrically opposed to the leading doctrines of the Church of Rome.
The two aforementioned statutes were born of the experience of our forefathers at that time, and also what they heard from their parents and grandparents of how Pope Sixtus V tried to get Queen Elizabeth I assassinated, of how the Pope, using Spanish troops, sought to overthrow the Protestants of the Northern Netherlands but was successfully resisted by the brave Dutchmen under the leadership of their Prince of Orange, of how the French Monarchy under the influence of the priests maltreated their Protestant subjects, massacring on St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, and during the following fortnight, about 70,000 Huguenots, how the Pope Gregory XIII celebrated this awful slaughter by a special singing of the Te Deum and the striking of a medal to commemorate this blow against those he termed ‘heretics’, and of how King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes so that one million of Huguenots had little choice but to flee at terrible risk to their lives their native land and be penniless exiles in another.
Even we who can look back over most of the years of this century can see, unless we are wilfully blind, how the priestly-moulded minds of those of Southern Ireland have acted and are providing an asylum for the priests’ pupils, the I.R.A., and kindred groups, who are committing murder and arson in Ulster, as well as giving complete immunity to those who have most deceitfully enticed unsuspecting British soldiers into quarters where the latter could be murdered, after which the former could make good their escape over the border. The Popes have not only not expressed their regret at their predecessor’s inhumanity to man, but the Papacy is still as deceitful and drunk with the blood of those she stigmatised as heretics as ever she was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We therefore humbly pray Your Majesty to be true to your Coronation Declaration ‘I am a faithful Protestant’ and have no fellowship with Rome (2 Cor. 6:16-18), but to arrest and reverse the Romeward drift both in Church and State, which has been so pronounced in the last hundred years and especially during Your Majesty’s reign.
And we shall continue to ask Almighty God to bless you and your family as well as to revive the Protestant Reformed Religion that it may be a power for regeneration and righteousness throughout your dominions.
D. A. THOMPSON, Chairman,
Bible Christian Unity Fellowship.