The Legend of Saint George and the Dragon
In late-third-century Africa Proconsularis, Gaius Georgius Cappadox, a young Roman tribune of the Imperial Guard, is sent by Emperor Diocletian as to audit the frontier district of Silene. His commission seems routine: inspect ledgers, verify quotas, and investigate irregularities in the new military supply tax. Yet when George and his aide, the blunt veteran Theodore, arrive, they find a city rotted from within. The local curator Severus, the civic guard, and even the temple of Saturn form a web of embezzlement, extortion, and murder. Beneath the veneer of Roman order, the cult of Saturn still practices ancient and evil rites.
George’s investigation draws him into confrontation with the high priest and the corrupt civic elite. His inquiries expose ledgers falsified to conceal disappearances, a protection racket run by a gang called “the Dragon,” and evidence that stolen funds may be supporting hostile border tribes. When his friend and commander Felix is killed in the resulting chaos, George realizes that the corruption is not bureaucratic but spiritual. The cult’s rites are not mere superstition but true demonic worship.
As riots sweep Silene and the high priest calls for a final sacrifice, George leads a desperate rescue. In a night of fire and terror, he faces the evil and defeats it not by steel alone but by invoking Christ’s name. The “dragon” is cast out, the cult destroyed, and Silene is saved.
Framed by a modern narrative, the story is rediscovered in a London archive by a journalist invited into a secret fellowship within the Order of St. Michael and St. George. As he hears of George’s forgotten story, he realizes that “the dragon” still endures in subtler forms.
This is a new, novel-length retelling of the story of St. George from the Golden Legend; part historical thriller, part moral reckoning, and all hardboiled Roman grit.
George’s investigation draws him into confrontation with the high priest and the corrupt civic elite. His inquiries expose ledgers falsified to conceal disappearances, a protection racket run by a gang called “the Dragon,” and evidence that stolen funds may be supporting hostile border tribes. When his friend and commander Felix is killed in the resulting chaos, George realizes that the corruption is not bureaucratic but spiritual. The cult’s rites are not mere superstition but true demonic worship.
As riots sweep Silene and the high priest calls for a final sacrifice, George leads a desperate rescue. In a night of fire and terror, he faces the evil and defeats it not by steel alone but by invoking Christ’s name. The “dragon” is cast out, the cult destroyed, and Silene is saved.
Framed by a modern narrative, the story is rediscovered in a London archive by a journalist invited into a secret fellowship within the Order of St. Michael and St. George. As he hears of George’s forgotten story, he realizes that “the dragon” still endures in subtler forms.
This is a new, novel-length retelling of the story of St. George from the Golden Legend; part historical thriller, part moral reckoning, and all hardboiled Roman grit.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Dorking, in Surrey, England, was still heavy with flowers when I arrived. Plastic-wrapped bouquets pressed against the iron gates, children’s drawings taped to the railings, the ink having run in the rain. The rally wasn’t loud. It wasn’t the kind of protest Westminster thinks it knows how to manage. A constable in a fluorescent yellow jacket stood sentinel every hundred feet, quietly scanning the crowd for signs of disorder. The protestors eyes, even and straight, drilled icily into the back of the officers’ heads.
The march was silent. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, men and women walked up the street carrying flags or draped them over their shoulders. Some were the red, white, and blue Union Flag, but those were a minority. Most were the flag of England, bearing the red cross of St. George on a white field. Parents stood with their children on the pavements, their little hands waving tiny flags. Old men in suits with medals pinned to their chests saluted as the ceremonial flags in the lead passed.
Behind the color guard came six placards, each bearing the face of a schoolchild from a grammar school here. They had been on a class trip to Horsell Common in Woking 30 minutes away when the attack began. The story was becoming familiar in England. A lone migrant with a knife, lashing out at whoever was nearest, carrying on until two police officers and a handful of construction workers finally brought him down. Four of the children died where they fell, two more in hospital. Another eight were left wounded, but home now.
No one said it aloud, but the silence carried the thought: the young are always the ones who pay. Their names will be recited, their faces printed, their deaths folded neatly into inquiries and commissions. The rest of us will walk past the flowers on the pavement, pretending an altar has not been built again, here in England, out of neglect and cowardice. The flags snapped against the lampposts, crimson strokes against a grey sky, and I recalled an old story stirring that somewhere, long ago, a child was dressed in white and handed over because the city would not change.
I thought back to a different kind of procession in Epping, 50 miles or so north of here on the other side of London a few months prior. It had been a sunny summer’s day then. This crowd was loud and unruly, not somber. Raucous chants rose as fists swung when rival groups clashed or police moved in to make an arrest. People from every walk of life seemed to be there, each with their own grievance. The English flag was there too, flaring above the noise. At the center of it all stood a shuttered two-star hotel, once a cheap stop for holidaymakers. Since the pandemic it had found a new purpose, and with it, a new source of resentment.
Protests, and the occasional riot, had become a fixture that summer. The country felt tense and brittle, as if the smallest spark might set it off. People told me they no longer recognized the streets they’d grown up on, that life was slipping out of reach and the culture around them was shifting under their feet. Their children weren’t safe and it didn’t seem like anyone wanted to protect them. What angered them most wasn’t just the change itself, but the sense of being silenced. Speaking too plainly could earn you not sympathy, but a set of handcuffs.
A councilor called the flag “divisive”, but flags are never only one thing. They can divide and unite at the same time, for that is their purpose. They mark out identity, are carried at the head of armies and planted on borders, while at the same time binding a people under a common symbol to unite behind. Perhaps that is what the liberals and oh-so-careful bureaucrats desperate to remove the flags feared, a united people.
The United Kingdom has not always been as united as its name suggests. It is a composite of the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and (Northern) Ireland, bound together by law and crown but never dissolved into a single people. Each still carries its own flag: the Scottish saltire, the Welsh dragon, the Irish cross of St. Patrick, and the English cross of St. George, all represented by the familiar red, white, and blue of the Union Flag.
For centuries that banner represented Britain abroad, flying from ships and colonial offices, while at home the island’s peoples quietly kept to their own symbols and loyalties, clinging to its heritage with pride. Increasingly now, the English have begun to do the same. In streets and suburbs, the red cross has reappeared in windows, on fences, even daubed on roundabouts. Councils call it vandalism, police strip it from posts as “traffic hazards,” and property owners fume when banners are tied to their gates. Yet the impulse behind it is unmistakable.
To American eyes, it may seem a small thing. In the United States, the flag is an ordinary fixture of life as it flies ubiquitously without a second thought. The sight of Old Glory is so common that an absence would be more noticeable than its presence. In Britain, the habit is different. Patriotism is not measured in flags, and the sudden appearance of them carries meaning. A Union Flag (erroneously called a “Jack”) flapping from a government building is routine, yet a street of English crosses strung between houses is a revolutionary act.
It was just a flag, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people reacted to it. The red cross was everywhere fluttering from lampposts, spray painted on white walls and taped in paper form to shop windows. Drunken men in football jerseys waved full-size flags from the top of a bus shelter, daring the police to pull them down. Counter-demonstrators tried snatching the miniatures from the hands of the protestors. Workmen on ladders were busy trying to remove unauthorized flags from the lampposts.
But elsewhere, the same cloth meant something else. Columnists and politicians scolded it as a provocation. Community leaders called it a dog-whistle. A few counter-protesters held up Union Flags instead, as if to say Britain could have one flag but not England. The fight now was whether the Cross of St. George belonged to everyone, or whether it had been seized by people too English. To the flag-wavers it was England itself, creased, weather-beaten, but still clung to by those who feared it might be taken from them.
Walking through the crowd I heard both sides without anyone having to say it aloud. To some, the flag was a battle standard and to others, a threat. I heard the arguments over who could wave it. If the flag no longer belonged to the English, perhaps the country didn’t either. Within that, there was a deeper uneasy question, asking, “Who gets to call themselves at home here, and at what cost?”
What struck me most was how rarely the question itself was spoken aloud. People spoke it softly in private, lowered their voices in pubs, but in public it was treated as something dangerous, even forbidden. Not just migration, but the crimes, the failures, the anger, all pressed into silence for fear that naming them would be worse than living with them. That, it seemed to me, was the deeper wrong, not the thing itself, but the refusal to face it.
What remained impossible for the government to admit was they didn’t want the native British to unite. Even having the hard conversations that must be had before problems could be solved must be suppressed under the guise of preventing incitement. Plain speech might offend the very people the state is terrified of offending. Better to take down the flags, hush the crowds, and pretend nothing is wrong, because if the migrants are angered, who knows what follows? Civil strife? Mass violence? The fear hung unspoken and governed everything.
The temptation, of course, is to step around it, paper it over, and let the noise of politics drown it out. That’s safer and keeps the peace. But when bought that way it begins to look like complicity, like the city in the old story that kept feeding its children to the dragon because it was easier than fighting it. The evil wasn’t just the strangers or what they might be doing, it was the refusal to face what everyone knew was there.
Yet the real evil isn’t migration. It’s the refusal to name what is plainly seen. It’s the silencing of debate, the criminalization of dissent, and the insistence that the public endure what they are forbidden to discuss. Tyranny dresses itself in politeness, but it is tyranny all the same. It does not stop with migration. The habit of calling good evil and evil good runs deeper into the destruction of marriage, the celebration of promiscuity, the reduction of children to a “choice,” the scorn for God, and the elevation of addiction into a lifestyle. Modern liberalism preaches tolerance but practices the inversion.
That inversion is the evil. The dragon does not always come breathing fire. Sometimes it comes wearing a smile, speaking of progress, asking only that we surrender our children, our faith, our truth. And in every age the question is the same, will we pretend our bargain with the Devil keeps us safe, or will we finally draw the sword against it?
That, in the end, was the very question Lord Thomas Windsor put to me. He appeared at my side in the press of the rally, caught me by the elbow, and steered me clear of the crush. It was no chance meeting, he already knew who I was. He had read my work, perhaps even seen me on television, and decided I was worth seeking out. With a wry half-smile he said something I still remember. “Evil triumphs here because we call it peace.” Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he invited me to a pub.
Lord Thomas Windsor of Kent was not the sort of man I expected to meet at a noisy street rally. In plain clothes he passed almost unnoticed, though there was something in his bearing, a posture bred of deference received rather than demanded. His face had that Windsor look to it, a faint echo of King George V if you stared long enough.
The family tree puts him in the shadows of royalty, descended from Prince George, Duke of Kent, by way of his third son, whom he never met after perishing during WWII. The dukedom never came his way and Thomas grew up out of the spotlight. Though he remains on the list, technically in the line of succession to the throne, he was 48th by now. “Titles end,” he once said in an interview, “oaths don’t.” That sums him up neatly, a man who lives as Thomas Windsor in ordinary life, but carries the memory of an older duty on his sleeve.
His opinions are unfashionable, even among his own kin, save that of his cousin Nicholas. A devout Anglican, he still worships from the Book of Common Prayer, rails against women’s ordination, and insists that England without the Church is not England at all. He calls abortion “the line where civilization ended,” and dismisses the cult of identity as the wrecking ball of family and duty. Critics sneer and call him a neo-Victorian, though he will not call himself a nationalist. “I am not a nationalist,” he’s fond of saying. “I am an Englishman.”
That makes him a royal pariah. He appears at coronations, funerals, the occasions where absence would be an insult, but he is never photographed in the center. Rumor has it he once rebuked the King himself over “defending the faiths,” (pointedly plural) and the courtiers haven’t forgiven it. He is tolerated rather than embraced within the House of Windsor.
And yet here he was, sliding into the car’s back seat beside me as if he’d always meant to. He spoke with the calm authority of someone who had already decided what mattered most, and it was not popularity. For His Lordship, England’s crisis was spiritual before it was political. To hear him tell it, the flag protests were not at their heart about migration at all but silencing the uncomfortable truth of savagery for the sake of harmony. Why exactly Lord Thomas picked me for a story I can’t ever print (well, not for a very long time at least) I can never be quite sure.
I’m not Fleet Street. I’m an American producer for Sky and Fox News, with the occasional commentary spot on both sides of the Atlantic whenever someone wants the “American conservative voice in London.” My editors at The American Spectator and sometimes National Review like to think I cover “culture and politics abroad,” which usually means pieces about British eccentricities and the odd election. The magazines don’t pay the bills, but I write for them out of habit and pride. What keeps me in South Kensington is television. It’s steady work behind the camera, and enough airtime to be useful without being a celebrity. I rent a small flat, write at an old table that’s been pressed into service as a desk, and otherwise keep my head down. I’m no crusader. Just a man from Indiana sent to make sense of England, and now and then to explain it back home.
The pub his car stopped at was the quaint, old-fashioned sort with carpet worn flat in the corners and beams stained by a hundred years of smoke of years gone by. It was not one of those antiseptic or faux-comfy Wetherspoon corporate public houses. Windsor ordered a pint of bitter by name, not brand, and I took the lager on tap. We settled into a pair of comfortable chairs by the fire away from the few mid-afternoon patrons. The Lord’s driver-cum-bodyguard took up a position just inside of the door.
We didn’t talk about protests at first. He steered the conversation elsewhere. I bristled with tension to know why I had been singled out for a private audience with royalty. I asked him politely about his grace-and-favor country house. He smiled and said it was drafty and wondered how prior generations ever lived in such places like that but admitted it had far more soul than his high-rise flat in London.
From there he wandered into books. He still read Kipling, he confessed, though it was no longer respectable to say so. He quoted “If” with a straight face, not as verse but as advice, and talked about how schoolmasters once drilled lines of Tennyson into boys until the rhythm lived in their bones. “We don’t teach our children to remember anymore and then we wonder why they forget themselves so quickly.”
Family came next. He mentioned a daughter, now grown, who lived abroad. He didn’t linger on her, only enough to say she had chosen a different sort of life. There was no bitterness, but something like resignation. Only once did he brush against politics, obliquely. The pub’s clock chimed, and he said, “We keep time by things that outlast us. Bells, prayers, sunsets are all stronger than parliaments.” Then he let the thought die, turned back to his pint, and asked me about my fiancée.
The small talk wound down. My pint was half-gone, his bitter nearly finished. The room had thinned. Only a pair of pensioners lingered at the bar, arguing over cricket. Thomas set his glass down carefully (by now he had insisted I call him by his Christian name). He hadn’t mentioned the rally once, neither the flags nor the arrests. Now he leaned back, folded his hands, and gave me the sort of look you only get from men who’ve lived too long with a secret.
“You don’t know why I stopped you, but you are too polite to ask,” he said at last. “It wasn’t to chat about small things.” There was no conspiratorial whisper, just the plain statement of a man who had decided I’d been given enough preliminaries. “I’ve read your work and I think you’ve seen enough to know the surface isn’t the whole story.”
He didn’t need to say, “the protests” or “migration.” The unspoken was enough. The silence that followed made it clear that what he meant was larger, the thing behind the issues, a pattern that outlasted news cycles. My journalists mind immediately began jumping to conclusions. That’s what I was paid for, wasn’t it? When I was a young man, fresh out of college, and writing for the local newspaper before it folded, everything was a grand conspiracy. The two dead drug addicts downtown the week before must have been related to the drive-by shooting in the bad neighborhood overnight. Someone was selling a tainted batch in our Rust Belt city, or so I hoped.
The instinct hadn’t gone away. Now, sitting across from a man in the line of succession to the throne in a pub in Essex, I felt it twitch again. Was this the moment I was being drawn into some grand design? For a moment I wondered if this was the stuff of the 1970s coup plots when generals, spymasters, and even Lord Mountbatten were rumored to be planning a takeover of the government. There certainly was a revolutionary fervor in the air of Britain these days. His words were too careful, and that only made my suspicions run further ahead than they should.
We let the trivial subjects drift away. We didn’t talk about the rally. The pub was quiet enough now that the tick of the clock behind the bar was louder than the chatter. I noticed the driver/bodyguard was watching the barman and last patron closely, but discreetly.
“It isn’t just this country,” Thomas said. “Everywhere you look, things feel fraught. Governments are stumbling and alliances fraying. The man on the street can feel the tension, the yearning like the electrical feeling before a thunderstorm. You can smell it in the air. Change is on the wind and maybe not good change. Wars and rumors of. It feels like order is breaking down and maybe even the world itself, succumbing into the entropy of the ages.” He turned his glass once, watching the foam settle. “We live as if nothing has changed, but everyone knows it has. The world carries itself like a man about to lose his temper.”
I thought of my own headlines, not just Britain, but France, Germany, the US. Street clashes, bombings, border standoffs. Ukraine, Israel/Iran and Hamas, China and Taiwan. None of it connected, yet all of it pointing in the same direction. An astute historian or Cassandra would say that the world felt like it was in the dark years of the 1930s again. Something foul was slouching our way.
“What unsettles me most,” he went on, “is there are things we no longer name aloud. Things too dangerous to talk about, so we cover them over with softer words, or we praise what once we shunned. We pretend it keeps the peace.” His voice dropped, though no one was listening. “Though it doesn’t. It only leaves us blind to what’s gathering.”
He left it there. Not a sermon, not a conspiracy, just the statement of a man who’d stared long enough at the times to see their shape. I knew what this man meant. He had spoken openly with only the boldness that a member of the royal family, insulated from frivolous prosecution meant to shush him, could. He railed against censorship, the uniformity of thought that pervaded media and politics, and decried the decline in traditional moral and national values. Loudly. “The world is in a moral decline and many try to ignore it, lie about it, even nod their heads though they know it is all a great calumny,” he once said campaigning for a friend in Parliament.
Then, after a moment, he leaned forward with the half-smile of someone about to change the subject. “Do you know the story of Saint George?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. Saint George, the patron saint of England, who was martyred by Rome 1,700 years ago and slayed a dragon. His image riding a white horse and driving a lance into a supine dragon graced the stained-glass windows of countless churches across the country. I knew that Thomas himself was a Knight Grand Cross (GCMG, cheekily known as “God calls me god”) of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. The legend about the saint slaying a dragon that was eating villagers and possibly a princess was certainly just that, legend, but there seemed to be little doubt that a Roman Christian soldier had been killed for his faith.
As Thomas spoke, I realized this was not the talk of an eccentric minor royal slumming it at a street protest, nor a man currying favor by cultivating a journalist. He had been watching me as carefully as an MI6 officer might study a prospective recruit, and now he was ready to open the door a little wider. His voice carried the weight of something older than politics. “You’re writing about flags and protests. What you don’t see is the war beneath it. That Cross has always divided between those who hate it, and those who believe in what it truly means. You’ve stumbled into something that has survived since Saint George himself.”
It would have been easy to assume he was talking about the flags, but I knew the Cross he meant was the one Christ bore. The banners in the streets were only shadows, symptoms of something deeper. This wasn’t about politics, but about the rot beneath them, the moral and spiritual decadence of an age that congratulates itself while repeating the perennial conflicts of men. The way he said it, calm but deliberate, I realized he wasn’t speaking in metaphors. He was drawing a line and inviting me to see what lay beyond it. For the first time I realized I was being led into a circle older and quieter than politics, a company of men who had kept watch over this Cross long after others forgot.
“Now, some would call me mad for saying it, but I feel the clock is not winding down at all, but winding up, getting faster and louder with every tick. My grandfather might have said the same in 1914, and my grand-uncle in 1939, when the world lurched into its last catastrophes. Yet what presses upon us now feels heavier. It’s not just armies in Europe anymore. It’s the Middle East smoldering, technology racing ahead of wisdom, and this strange new intelligence we’ve conjured out of wires and code. We’re climbing a new Tower of Babel, higher than ever, and I fear we’ve reached the point where only divine intervention will stop the collapse. For the last time, if mercy allows.”
“Are you talking about the Second Coming?” I asked, half in jest. “The end times? Christians have been saying it is imminent since the crucifixion.”
Windsor’s eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in the way of a man choosing his words carefully. “Yes,” he said at last. “Not in the sense of a lunatic with a sandwich board, but in the sense that all signs point toward a culmination. The World Wars were storms within history. This feels like the end of history itself. If one has reason, one must also have the courage to admit where the evidence leads.”
He went on, careful to explain himself. His eschatology, by his own rubric, was not the raving of a schizophrenic zealot in Speaker’s Corner but the reasoning of a man convinced by evidence. “It could be tomorrow, or it could be centuries,” he said. “I’ve no intention of selling everything and moving to Jerusalem. What I mean is the sense of imminence, the chaos, the decay. The world feels as if it’s grinding itself to pieces, conflict and depravity rising to rival the days of Noah. Perhaps we’re like frogs in the boiling pot, blind to how far off the path our people have already wandered.”
That, he explained, was the purpose behind his provocative interviews, the podcasts, and the guest articles that fewer and fewer bothered to read. He felt honor-bound to speak. Quoting Ephesians, he said, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” Then he turned to Ezekiel, reminding me that a watchman who failed to sound the alarm shared in the blood of the city. “A Christian cannot be lukewarm,” he said. “We are obliged to speak, and to act, against what we see.”
And then, with a hint of something darker, he added, “That is why we do what we do, my companions and I, and say what we say. We are not bound by English politeness, nor by deference to the King, whether he be my relative or not.” This was a man who answered to God and not in the way of a fanatic, but in the ways of old.
“‘Companions’?” I asked.
He raised his brow to signal I had caught the hint. We had arrived at the meat of our meeting. He took a card from his inner breast pocket and slid it to me. It was a white business card of very fine stock. In the center of a bath star, superimposed over a cross, was a winged man standing defiantly. Small red letters read “The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.” Though the card had been printed with an image of the order’s badge, I felt the card had been debossed curiously in the shape of a dragon.
“This is more than just the calling card of an order of chivalry. Tonight, nine o’clock, Queen’s Chapel at the Palace of St. James. There is a story you need to hear. Not something that will grace the evening newscast. It’s not a current event, but a story you will want to hear very much indeed.” His words carried a solemnity that felt heavier than mere courtesy. It was not an order, but an invitation that only a fool or a coward would refuse.
He nodded to his driver, who moved toward the door. “I will see you there?”
“Certainly, my Lord.” The moment felt so heavy it seemed appropriate to give him full courtesy.
We shook hands and he took his leave. The air seemed quieter once he was gone. I fingered the card, its ink catching the light, and wondered what, exactly, I had agreed to. It might be no more than a dusty lecture on forgotten history. He’s probably just being dramatic, I thought, half-humorously. A minor royal who wants attention and to lend his voice to politics. Or it might be something else entirely, a confidence I wasn’t sure I wanted, perhaps the sort of knowledge that leaves you either complicit or condemned.
Dorking, in Surrey, England, was still heavy with flowers when I arrived. Plastic-wrapped bouquets pressed against the iron gates, children’s drawings taped to the railings, the ink having run in the rain. The rally wasn’t loud. It wasn’t the kind of protest Westminster thinks it knows how to manage. A constable in a fluorescent yellow jacket stood sentinel every hundred feet, quietly scanning the crowd for signs of disorder. The protestors eyes, even and straight, drilled icily into the back of the officers’ heads.
The march was silent. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, men and women walked up the street carrying flags or draped them over their shoulders. Some were the red, white, and blue Union Flag, but those were a minority. Most were the flag of England, bearing the red cross of St. George on a white field. Parents stood with their children on the pavements, their little hands waving tiny flags. Old men in suits with medals pinned to their chests saluted as the ceremonial flags in the lead passed.
Behind the color guard came six placards, each bearing the face of a schoolchild from a grammar school here. They had been on a class trip to Horsell Common in Woking 30 minutes away when the attack began. The story was becoming familiar in England. A lone migrant with a knife, lashing out at whoever was nearest, carrying on until two police officers and a handful of construction workers finally brought him down. Four of the children died where they fell, two more in hospital. Another eight were left wounded, but home now.
No one said it aloud, but the silence carried the thought: the young are always the ones who pay. Their names will be recited, their faces printed, their deaths folded neatly into inquiries and commissions. The rest of us will walk past the flowers on the pavement, pretending an altar has not been built again, here in England, out of neglect and cowardice. The flags snapped against the lampposts, crimson strokes against a grey sky, and I recalled an old story stirring that somewhere, long ago, a child was dressed in white and handed over because the city would not change.
I thought back to a different kind of procession in Epping, 50 miles or so north of here on the other side of London a few months prior. It had been a sunny summer’s day then. This crowd was loud and unruly, not somber. Raucous chants rose as fists swung when rival groups clashed or police moved in to make an arrest. People from every walk of life seemed to be there, each with their own grievance. The English flag was there too, flaring above the noise. At the center of it all stood a shuttered two-star hotel, once a cheap stop for holidaymakers. Since the pandemic it had found a new purpose, and with it, a new source of resentment.
Protests, and the occasional riot, had become a fixture that summer. The country felt tense and brittle, as if the smallest spark might set it off. People told me they no longer recognized the streets they’d grown up on, that life was slipping out of reach and the culture around them was shifting under their feet. Their children weren’t safe and it didn’t seem like anyone wanted to protect them. What angered them most wasn’t just the change itself, but the sense of being silenced. Speaking too plainly could earn you not sympathy, but a set of handcuffs.
A councilor called the flag “divisive”, but flags are never only one thing. They can divide and unite at the same time, for that is their purpose. They mark out identity, are carried at the head of armies and planted on borders, while at the same time binding a people under a common symbol to unite behind. Perhaps that is what the liberals and oh-so-careful bureaucrats desperate to remove the flags feared, a united people.
The United Kingdom has not always been as united as its name suggests. It is a composite of the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and (Northern) Ireland, bound together by law and crown but never dissolved into a single people. Each still carries its own flag: the Scottish saltire, the Welsh dragon, the Irish cross of St. Patrick, and the English cross of St. George, all represented by the familiar red, white, and blue of the Union Flag.
For centuries that banner represented Britain abroad, flying from ships and colonial offices, while at home the island’s peoples quietly kept to their own symbols and loyalties, clinging to its heritage with pride. Increasingly now, the English have begun to do the same. In streets and suburbs, the red cross has reappeared in windows, on fences, even daubed on roundabouts. Councils call it vandalism, police strip it from posts as “traffic hazards,” and property owners fume when banners are tied to their gates. Yet the impulse behind it is unmistakable.
To American eyes, it may seem a small thing. In the United States, the flag is an ordinary fixture of life as it flies ubiquitously without a second thought. The sight of Old Glory is so common that an absence would be more noticeable than its presence. In Britain, the habit is different. Patriotism is not measured in flags, and the sudden appearance of them carries meaning. A Union Flag (erroneously called a “Jack”) flapping from a government building is routine, yet a street of English crosses strung between houses is a revolutionary act.
It was just a flag, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people reacted to it. The red cross was everywhere fluttering from lampposts, spray painted on white walls and taped in paper form to shop windows. Drunken men in football jerseys waved full-size flags from the top of a bus shelter, daring the police to pull them down. Counter-demonstrators tried snatching the miniatures from the hands of the protestors. Workmen on ladders were busy trying to remove unauthorized flags from the lampposts.
But elsewhere, the same cloth meant something else. Columnists and politicians scolded it as a provocation. Community leaders called it a dog-whistle. A few counter-protesters held up Union Flags instead, as if to say Britain could have one flag but not England. The fight now was whether the Cross of St. George belonged to everyone, or whether it had been seized by people too English. To the flag-wavers it was England itself, creased, weather-beaten, but still clung to by those who feared it might be taken from them.
Walking through the crowd I heard both sides without anyone having to say it aloud. To some, the flag was a battle standard and to others, a threat. I heard the arguments over who could wave it. If the flag no longer belonged to the English, perhaps the country didn’t either. Within that, there was a deeper uneasy question, asking, “Who gets to call themselves at home here, and at what cost?”
What struck me most was how rarely the question itself was spoken aloud. People spoke it softly in private, lowered their voices in pubs, but in public it was treated as something dangerous, even forbidden. Not just migration, but the crimes, the failures, the anger, all pressed into silence for fear that naming them would be worse than living with them. That, it seemed to me, was the deeper wrong, not the thing itself, but the refusal to face it.
What remained impossible for the government to admit was they didn’t want the native British to unite. Even having the hard conversations that must be had before problems could be solved must be suppressed under the guise of preventing incitement. Plain speech might offend the very people the state is terrified of offending. Better to take down the flags, hush the crowds, and pretend nothing is wrong, because if the migrants are angered, who knows what follows? Civil strife? Mass violence? The fear hung unspoken and governed everything.
The temptation, of course, is to step around it, paper it over, and let the noise of politics drown it out. That’s safer and keeps the peace. But when bought that way it begins to look like complicity, like the city in the old story that kept feeding its children to the dragon because it was easier than fighting it. The evil wasn’t just the strangers or what they might be doing, it was the refusal to face what everyone knew was there.
Yet the real evil isn’t migration. It’s the refusal to name what is plainly seen. It’s the silencing of debate, the criminalization of dissent, and the insistence that the public endure what they are forbidden to discuss. Tyranny dresses itself in politeness, but it is tyranny all the same. It does not stop with migration. The habit of calling good evil and evil good runs deeper into the destruction of marriage, the celebration of promiscuity, the reduction of children to a “choice,” the scorn for God, and the elevation of addiction into a lifestyle. Modern liberalism preaches tolerance but practices the inversion.
That inversion is the evil. The dragon does not always come breathing fire. Sometimes it comes wearing a smile, speaking of progress, asking only that we surrender our children, our faith, our truth. And in every age the question is the same, will we pretend our bargain with the Devil keeps us safe, or will we finally draw the sword against it?
That, in the end, was the very question Lord Thomas Windsor put to me. He appeared at my side in the press of the rally, caught me by the elbow, and steered me clear of the crush. It was no chance meeting, he already knew who I was. He had read my work, perhaps even seen me on television, and decided I was worth seeking out. With a wry half-smile he said something I still remember. “Evil triumphs here because we call it peace.” Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he invited me to a pub.
Lord Thomas Windsor of Kent was not the sort of man I expected to meet at a noisy street rally. In plain clothes he passed almost unnoticed, though there was something in his bearing, a posture bred of deference received rather than demanded. His face had that Windsor look to it, a faint echo of King George V if you stared long enough.
The family tree puts him in the shadows of royalty, descended from Prince George, Duke of Kent, by way of his third son, whom he never met after perishing during WWII. The dukedom never came his way and Thomas grew up out of the spotlight. Though he remains on the list, technically in the line of succession to the throne, he was 48th by now. “Titles end,” he once said in an interview, “oaths don’t.” That sums him up neatly, a man who lives as Thomas Windsor in ordinary life, but carries the memory of an older duty on his sleeve.
His opinions are unfashionable, even among his own kin, save that of his cousin Nicholas. A devout Anglican, he still worships from the Book of Common Prayer, rails against women’s ordination, and insists that England without the Church is not England at all. He calls abortion “the line where civilization ended,” and dismisses the cult of identity as the wrecking ball of family and duty. Critics sneer and call him a neo-Victorian, though he will not call himself a nationalist. “I am not a nationalist,” he’s fond of saying. “I am an Englishman.”
That makes him a royal pariah. He appears at coronations, funerals, the occasions where absence would be an insult, but he is never photographed in the center. Rumor has it he once rebuked the King himself over “defending the faiths,” (pointedly plural) and the courtiers haven’t forgiven it. He is tolerated rather than embraced within the House of Windsor.
And yet here he was, sliding into the car’s back seat beside me as if he’d always meant to. He spoke with the calm authority of someone who had already decided what mattered most, and it was not popularity. For His Lordship, England’s crisis was spiritual before it was political. To hear him tell it, the flag protests were not at their heart about migration at all but silencing the uncomfortable truth of savagery for the sake of harmony. Why exactly Lord Thomas picked me for a story I can’t ever print (well, not for a very long time at least) I can never be quite sure.
I’m not Fleet Street. I’m an American producer for Sky and Fox News, with the occasional commentary spot on both sides of the Atlantic whenever someone wants the “American conservative voice in London.” My editors at The American Spectator and sometimes National Review like to think I cover “culture and politics abroad,” which usually means pieces about British eccentricities and the odd election. The magazines don’t pay the bills, but I write for them out of habit and pride. What keeps me in South Kensington is television. It’s steady work behind the camera, and enough airtime to be useful without being a celebrity. I rent a small flat, write at an old table that’s been pressed into service as a desk, and otherwise keep my head down. I’m no crusader. Just a man from Indiana sent to make sense of England, and now and then to explain it back home.
The pub his car stopped at was the quaint, old-fashioned sort with carpet worn flat in the corners and beams stained by a hundred years of smoke of years gone by. It was not one of those antiseptic or faux-comfy Wetherspoon corporate public houses. Windsor ordered a pint of bitter by name, not brand, and I took the lager on tap. We settled into a pair of comfortable chairs by the fire away from the few mid-afternoon patrons. The Lord’s driver-cum-bodyguard took up a position just inside of the door.
We didn’t talk about protests at first. He steered the conversation elsewhere. I bristled with tension to know why I had been singled out for a private audience with royalty. I asked him politely about his grace-and-favor country house. He smiled and said it was drafty and wondered how prior generations ever lived in such places like that but admitted it had far more soul than his high-rise flat in London.
From there he wandered into books. He still read Kipling, he confessed, though it was no longer respectable to say so. He quoted “If” with a straight face, not as verse but as advice, and talked about how schoolmasters once drilled lines of Tennyson into boys until the rhythm lived in their bones. “We don’t teach our children to remember anymore and then we wonder why they forget themselves so quickly.”
Family came next. He mentioned a daughter, now grown, who lived abroad. He didn’t linger on her, only enough to say she had chosen a different sort of life. There was no bitterness, but something like resignation. Only once did he brush against politics, obliquely. The pub’s clock chimed, and he said, “We keep time by things that outlast us. Bells, prayers, sunsets are all stronger than parliaments.” Then he let the thought die, turned back to his pint, and asked me about my fiancée.
The small talk wound down. My pint was half-gone, his bitter nearly finished. The room had thinned. Only a pair of pensioners lingered at the bar, arguing over cricket. Thomas set his glass down carefully (by now he had insisted I call him by his Christian name). He hadn’t mentioned the rally once, neither the flags nor the arrests. Now he leaned back, folded his hands, and gave me the sort of look you only get from men who’ve lived too long with a secret.
“You don’t know why I stopped you, but you are too polite to ask,” he said at last. “It wasn’t to chat about small things.” There was no conspiratorial whisper, just the plain statement of a man who had decided I’d been given enough preliminaries. “I’ve read your work and I think you’ve seen enough to know the surface isn’t the whole story.”
He didn’t need to say, “the protests” or “migration.” The unspoken was enough. The silence that followed made it clear that what he meant was larger, the thing behind the issues, a pattern that outlasted news cycles. My journalists mind immediately began jumping to conclusions. That’s what I was paid for, wasn’t it? When I was a young man, fresh out of college, and writing for the local newspaper before it folded, everything was a grand conspiracy. The two dead drug addicts downtown the week before must have been related to the drive-by shooting in the bad neighborhood overnight. Someone was selling a tainted batch in our Rust Belt city, or so I hoped.
The instinct hadn’t gone away. Now, sitting across from a man in the line of succession to the throne in a pub in Essex, I felt it twitch again. Was this the moment I was being drawn into some grand design? For a moment I wondered if this was the stuff of the 1970s coup plots when generals, spymasters, and even Lord Mountbatten were rumored to be planning a takeover of the government. There certainly was a revolutionary fervor in the air of Britain these days. His words were too careful, and that only made my suspicions run further ahead than they should.
We let the trivial subjects drift away. We didn’t talk about the rally. The pub was quiet enough now that the tick of the clock behind the bar was louder than the chatter. I noticed the driver/bodyguard was watching the barman and last patron closely, but discreetly.
“It isn’t just this country,” Thomas said. “Everywhere you look, things feel fraught. Governments are stumbling and alliances fraying. The man on the street can feel the tension, the yearning like the electrical feeling before a thunderstorm. You can smell it in the air. Change is on the wind and maybe not good change. Wars and rumors of. It feels like order is breaking down and maybe even the world itself, succumbing into the entropy of the ages.” He turned his glass once, watching the foam settle. “We live as if nothing has changed, but everyone knows it has. The world carries itself like a man about to lose his temper.”
I thought of my own headlines, not just Britain, but France, Germany, the US. Street clashes, bombings, border standoffs. Ukraine, Israel/Iran and Hamas, China and Taiwan. None of it connected, yet all of it pointing in the same direction. An astute historian or Cassandra would say that the world felt like it was in the dark years of the 1930s again. Something foul was slouching our way.
“What unsettles me most,” he went on, “is there are things we no longer name aloud. Things too dangerous to talk about, so we cover them over with softer words, or we praise what once we shunned. We pretend it keeps the peace.” His voice dropped, though no one was listening. “Though it doesn’t. It only leaves us blind to what’s gathering.”
He left it there. Not a sermon, not a conspiracy, just the statement of a man who’d stared long enough at the times to see their shape. I knew what this man meant. He had spoken openly with only the boldness that a member of the royal family, insulated from frivolous prosecution meant to shush him, could. He railed against censorship, the uniformity of thought that pervaded media and politics, and decried the decline in traditional moral and national values. Loudly. “The world is in a moral decline and many try to ignore it, lie about it, even nod their heads though they know it is all a great calumny,” he once said campaigning for a friend in Parliament.
Then, after a moment, he leaned forward with the half-smile of someone about to change the subject. “Do you know the story of Saint George?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. Saint George, the patron saint of England, who was martyred by Rome 1,700 years ago and slayed a dragon. His image riding a white horse and driving a lance into a supine dragon graced the stained-glass windows of countless churches across the country. I knew that Thomas himself was a Knight Grand Cross (GCMG, cheekily known as “God calls me god”) of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. The legend about the saint slaying a dragon that was eating villagers and possibly a princess was certainly just that, legend, but there seemed to be little doubt that a Roman Christian soldier had been killed for his faith.
As Thomas spoke, I realized this was not the talk of an eccentric minor royal slumming it at a street protest, nor a man currying favor by cultivating a journalist. He had been watching me as carefully as an MI6 officer might study a prospective recruit, and now he was ready to open the door a little wider. His voice carried the weight of something older than politics. “You’re writing about flags and protests. What you don’t see is the war beneath it. That Cross has always divided between those who hate it, and those who believe in what it truly means. You’ve stumbled into something that has survived since Saint George himself.”
It would have been easy to assume he was talking about the flags, but I knew the Cross he meant was the one Christ bore. The banners in the streets were only shadows, symptoms of something deeper. This wasn’t about politics, but about the rot beneath them, the moral and spiritual decadence of an age that congratulates itself while repeating the perennial conflicts of men. The way he said it, calm but deliberate, I realized he wasn’t speaking in metaphors. He was drawing a line and inviting me to see what lay beyond it. For the first time I realized I was being led into a circle older and quieter than politics, a company of men who had kept watch over this Cross long after others forgot.
“Now, some would call me mad for saying it, but I feel the clock is not winding down at all, but winding up, getting faster and louder with every tick. My grandfather might have said the same in 1914, and my grand-uncle in 1939, when the world lurched into its last catastrophes. Yet what presses upon us now feels heavier. It’s not just armies in Europe anymore. It’s the Middle East smoldering, technology racing ahead of wisdom, and this strange new intelligence we’ve conjured out of wires and code. We’re climbing a new Tower of Babel, higher than ever, and I fear we’ve reached the point where only divine intervention will stop the collapse. For the last time, if mercy allows.”
“Are you talking about the Second Coming?” I asked, half in jest. “The end times? Christians have been saying it is imminent since the crucifixion.”
Windsor’s eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in the way of a man choosing his words carefully. “Yes,” he said at last. “Not in the sense of a lunatic with a sandwich board, but in the sense that all signs point toward a culmination. The World Wars were storms within history. This feels like the end of history itself. If one has reason, one must also have the courage to admit where the evidence leads.”
He went on, careful to explain himself. His eschatology, by his own rubric, was not the raving of a schizophrenic zealot in Speaker’s Corner but the reasoning of a man convinced by evidence. “It could be tomorrow, or it could be centuries,” he said. “I’ve no intention of selling everything and moving to Jerusalem. What I mean is the sense of imminence, the chaos, the decay. The world feels as if it’s grinding itself to pieces, conflict and depravity rising to rival the days of Noah. Perhaps we’re like frogs in the boiling pot, blind to how far off the path our people have already wandered.”
That, he explained, was the purpose behind his provocative interviews, the podcasts, and the guest articles that fewer and fewer bothered to read. He felt honor-bound to speak. Quoting Ephesians, he said, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” Then he turned to Ezekiel, reminding me that a watchman who failed to sound the alarm shared in the blood of the city. “A Christian cannot be lukewarm,” he said. “We are obliged to speak, and to act, against what we see.”
And then, with a hint of something darker, he added, “That is why we do what we do, my companions and I, and say what we say. We are not bound by English politeness, nor by deference to the King, whether he be my relative or not.” This was a man who answered to God and not in the way of a fanatic, but in the ways of old.
“‘Companions’?” I asked.
He raised his brow to signal I had caught the hint. We had arrived at the meat of our meeting. He took a card from his inner breast pocket and slid it to me. It was a white business card of very fine stock. In the center of a bath star, superimposed over a cross, was a winged man standing defiantly. Small red letters read “The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.” Though the card had been printed with an image of the order’s badge, I felt the card had been debossed curiously in the shape of a dragon.
“This is more than just the calling card of an order of chivalry. Tonight, nine o’clock, Queen’s Chapel at the Palace of St. James. There is a story you need to hear. Not something that will grace the evening newscast. It’s not a current event, but a story you will want to hear very much indeed.” His words carried a solemnity that felt heavier than mere courtesy. It was not an order, but an invitation that only a fool or a coward would refuse.
He nodded to his driver, who moved toward the door. “I will see you there?”
“Certainly, my Lord.” The moment felt so heavy it seemed appropriate to give him full courtesy.
We shook hands and he took his leave. The air seemed quieter once he was gone. I fingered the card, its ink catching the light, and wondered what, exactly, I had agreed to. It might be no more than a dusty lecture on forgotten history. He’s probably just being dramatic, I thought, half-humorously. A minor royal who wants attention and to lend his voice to politics. Or it might be something else entirely, a confidence I wasn’t sure I wanted, perhaps the sort of knowledge that leaves you either complicit or condemned.