Rathfarnham Group

The Rathfarnham Group is the informal name given to a group of influential figures within the present Orthodox Argan of Elland; officially called the Committee for the Oversight of the Western Renunciaries – the function for which the body was established in 1909 – the group takes its more familiar name from the Temple of Sopiana in Rathfarnham, a market town in north-western Elland, where it was based until 1984. One of the leading conservative factions within the Ellish argan, the group has achieved a greater recent prominence through the elevation of one of its number, Daphne Blake, to the position of Holy Mother in 2012.

1940s and 1950s: emergence

The beginnings of the Rathfarnham Group in its current form can probably be dated back to the disputed appointment of Eleanor Sanders as Holy Mother in Dominy 1940. While Sanders’ appointment can be seen in the wider context of the more neutral relations between the Orthodox and Reform wings of Cairony prevalent at the time, the hardline element on the conservative flank of the Ellish argan found the moderate Sanders difficult to tolerate, and a covert oppositional group began to coalesce from the spring of 1941 around Celestine Wardour, the archmatron of the Familia Mardenburgi in western Elland and the main challenger to Sanders during the election campaign.

Wardour’s attempt at the gathering together of like minds was largely dismissed as petulance at the time – the comment of the later Holy Mother Ernestine Peace, herself not well-known for respecting other people’s opinions, that “if the bearing of grudges were a professional sport, [Wardour] would be a millionaire by now” mirrored a widely-held view. However, this coterie sought, at least at the outset, to position itself as a “critical friend” to the Holy Mother and her counsellors and was largely accepted as such, as Sanders sought to heal wounds from what had been a divisive election process and turn the argan’s attention back to its spiritual responsibilities.

This position would not last. As civil war broke out in Ceresora, one of the largest parts of the Orthodox communion, from early in 1943, Wardour and her allies were vociferous in protesting Savamese and Cantairean support for the reformer Cairan community as unwarranted interference in a purely internal issue for the Ceresorans (and conveniently ignoring Odann’s support for the mainly Orthodox government in Cavino). Wardour’s stridency in insisting that Elland’s government show tangible support for the Legitimists in Ceresora was a near-constant trial to Henry IV and his Lord Chancellor, the Marquis of Bolland, who were determinedly engaged in seeking to keep Elland out of what was already looking like a quagmire. Attempts at internal discipline, however, were largely futile given Wardour’s substantial support base and fears on Sanders’ part that to press the issue risked fracturing the argan itself. It would not be until as late as 1949, amid the revulsion felt across Cairony by the assassination of Ceresora’s Holy Mother Vitalia di Grottacalda, that Wardour would be cowed into moderating her line; and the group was broadly supportive of Peace’s actions as she set herself up in opposition to Sanders’ successor Genevieve Custer in the later part of the Long War period.

1960s: taking sides?

The Rathfarnham contingent were largely content to act as a ginger group through much of Peace’s term in office, as the Holy Mother shared much of their stance in a range of issues; and they were solid in their support for Peace’s “reconciliatory” trip to Ráth in 1961 as the leading Orthodox argans publicly bandaged the wounds of the Gaste War. However, they were widely thought to have misjudged their position when they sought to intervene as Peace took action against the rebel priestess Laurel Reynard in 1969. Reynard had not been part of the Rathfarnham Group, although she had been a significant ally before her shift towards puritanism distanced her from it. Although she had sought to distance her stance from baseline puritanism in the wake of the atrocities of the Ceresoran Civil War, Peace dismissed most of her arguments as sophistry and pushed the arganic council into laicising Reynard in 1969.

Sheila Donnelly, who had succeeded Ward as the Rathfarnham Group’s leader in 1961, protested the action as precipitate and counter-productive and argued for Reynard’s retention in the interests of a broader communion, even though there is some substantial evidence to suggest that Reynard both saw the action coming and accepted it as a vindication of her own position. The unrepentant Reynard refused to acknowledge the loss of her credentials and took her supporters out of the mainstream, forming the unofficial Vastrelline Argan of Elland from her home town of Otway in the midlands in defiance of Peace’s invoking of a writ of ex porte over Reynard’s followers; Donnelly’s backing for Reynard, although not necessarily wholehearted, caused some overspill for the Rathfarnhamites, who to some extent retreated from front-line debate during the remainder of Peace’s period in office.

1970s and 1980s: the wilderness years

With the retirement in 1972 of the indomitable Peace – who, for all her arguments with the Rathfarnhamites, had broadly been able to count on their support in council – the group sought to exert its influence in more covert fashion. Peace’s successors, Sophia Light and Dominy Stratton, were, on the whole, more conciliatory figures, with Light in particular anxious to help the argan’s sisters in Odann as that country entered a period of wider interordinate engagement under its recently-enthroned Defender, Diarmuid II.

While Light enjoyed broad respect across the arganic community and was strong enough within council not to require much support from the conservatives, Stratton was markedly less dominant and perhaps more pulled by events than her predecessor, allowing the Rathfarnham contingent to reassert itself. This was a particular factor in 1985, when the small Darnelite community in Elland – generally disapproved of in most Orthodox states, and wholly proscribed in Odann – was under suspicion of tolerating, and in some cases facilitating, immoral practices. Martine Dray, leader of the Rathfarnham group, was in the vanguard of those pressing for action against the Darnelites, insisting on the closure of their temples as affronts to morality; Stratton was in no position to bring this about, as the Darnelites were an independent or dissident argan and not answerable to the main Ellish argan, but she was able to push Lord Chancellor J. R. Hartley into deporting the Darnelites’ leader Régine de Vazon to her native Brex-Sarre as a small face-saving measure.

Stratton had perhaps forgotten the maxim with which every schoolchild grows up that showing weakness towards a bully – which Dray indubitably was, on an intellectual level – merely encourages further bullying. Over the next year and a half the Holy Mother’s every attempt to show moderation and tolerance was decried and mocked – albeit in impeccably sound theological terms – by Dray as dangerous weakness, with the gleeful support of her associates. In the words of one close observer in this period, “Dray wore Stratton down like a lioness stalking a gazelle, and with rather similar results.” During this period Dray, although preferring the style of “Doctor” from her academic credentials rather than the “Mother” to which she was entitled, seemed to increasingly adopt the demeanour of a Holy Mother-in-waiting, going out of her way on occasion to make connections with influential figures within the Orthodox Cairan world.

However, by the time that Stratton chose to step down from her office late in 1987, a tide was growing within the argan which was coming to resent Dray’s hectoring and at-times condescending manner, and her increasingly less concealed sense of entitlement to its highest office. While Rose Marchmont’s credentials for the role were respectable in themselves, the vote which brought her to office was undeniably swelled by an “anyone but Dray” campaign to which the officially-neutral Stratton gave of-necessity covert support. Dray realised too late in proceedings just how many hostages to fortune she had given away, but her attempts to retract some of her past statements were dismissed as insincere and embarrassing; Marchmont was chosen as the new Holy Mother by a margin of 69% to 31%.

1990s: transition

Dray remained an influential figure on the conservative wing of the argan, and continued to network widely across the Orthodox community, viewing these actions as both truer to the spirit of Cairony and of great importance when more moderate voices were in the ascendancy and “subverting” Orthodox Cairony in its attempts at rapprochement during this time. A particularly positive contact was with the new Defender of Odann, Ultan II, whom Dray met as part of the Ellish delegation which attended his coronation in 1988. Ultan and Dray established a good rapport almost immediately, and the Defender is supposed to have offered, perhaps only half in jest, to exchange Dray for Odann’s then-incumbent Holy Mother, the moderate Máirín ní Thuathail. However, from the beginning of the 1990s she gradually began to yield her position on the front lines of debate, while consciously seeking to mentor the best and brightest of the argan’s younger generation. Of this group, Daphne Blake began to emerge as Dray’s most promising protégée in the last years of the century, and she was increasingly regarded as Dray’s most likely successor as leader of the Rathfarnham Group from perhaps as early as 2000.

2000s and 2010s: reach out and touch

Daphne Blake: this photograph from 2012, just before her election as Holy Mother.

From probably the beginning of 2004 Blake and the group’s treasurer Constance Paull began a discreet, if not necessarily covert, campaign by which they sought financial backing from laypersons across Elland who sympathised with the conservative stances of the Rathfarnhamites, and who felt that their arguments were not receiving a proper hearing in either religious or lay circles. While there was a marked tendency to dismiss many of these new supporters as on a par with the fictional newspaper correspondent and bewildered reactionary “Disgusted of Barchester”, a fair number of those who were approached were persons of both significant means and measurable influence.

The idea of the argan’s more doctrinally intransigent cosying up to big business and government in Elland prompted some not wholly muffled shrieks of indignation from the liberal wing – and a few veiled claims that Blake was trying to set up an “argan within the argan”. Even so, the alliance proved beneficial on both sides, bolstering Blake’s position as spokeswoman for the conservative wing and allowing the Rathfarnhamites and their allies a respectable war-chest for their pet projects, including the establishment of the Dray Foundation, a conservative research group founded in 2007 and named after Martine Dray, who had died two years earlier and was far from forgotten among her peers. Blake’s status was such at this point that her nomination to succeed the retiring Cherie Truran as Holy Mother in 2012 was only a logical progression.

Despite this, Blake was, at just 41 years of age, one of the youngest clergywomen to seek election as Holy Mother of Elland since that title was brought into being with Adeline Bell in 1489, and although her supporters touted the bid as a “changing of the guard” at the highest levels of the argan, a sizeable number – including Truran herself – saw Blake’s challenge as a means of putting a younger and fresher face on old and discredited doctrines, and decried her for showing the same sense of entitlement that her mentor Dray had displayed in the past.

Current: room at the top

However, although the arguments rocked back and forth until the election, the result was much as had been predicted beforehand. Blake capitalised on a badly divided opposition to see off Wilhelmina Heard, a senior matron within the Familia Litherlandii in the south-west, on the first ballot and pick up enough of her support to gain the upper hand over Felicity Netherfield, the archmatron of Clairgrave, on the second. She was politically astute enough to retain a number of higher-profile opponents in post on the arganic council, but otherwise brought forward several key supporters, in particular her old ally Paull, who became Custos Arcam or treasurer for the argan.

While the Rathfarnham Group remains officially a distinct entity, with several key members enjoying access to the corridors of influence and power – faithly and secular – within Elland, it seems set to preside over a shift of emphasis away from more progressive stances which have even before this found shallow ground within which to take root. As regards the wider Orthodox community, its push towards the conservative flank has perhaps shifted the Argan of Elland beyond its counterpart in Odann, which has historically been regarded as the dominant Orthodox argan since the Reform Wars of the 18th century.