‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore told us last weekend. As a bonus in this Trollopean tale we learnt that, by Church of England canon law, ‘men born illegitimately were for centuries barred from becoming archbishops’, or indeed bishops.
The affair also reminded me of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, in which Bernard Clark writes to the Earl of Clincham on behalf of Mr Salteena: ‘The bearer of this letter is an old friend of mine not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first-rate butcher but his mother was a decent family called Hyssopps of the Glen so you see he is not so bad and is desireus of being the correct article.’
Daisy did not say illegitimate, but it, and legitimate, have done service in English these six centuries, and before that in their Latin forms.
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