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The Church Militant. All Britain wished them well—or almost all. Mr. Eden's second marriage, said the High Anglican Church Times, "like the unprecedented adoption by the American Democrats of a divorced man as candidate for the presidency, shows how far the climate of public opinion has changed for the worse, even since 1936 . . . [when Edward VIII left his throne for a woman]. It is now apparently to be accepted . . . that those who occupy the highest positions . . . may break the Church's law without embarrassment . . . This may make remarriage after divorce 'respectable' in the eyes of a pagan generation. But it does not make it . . . right."
Instantly Britain's decent, godless* daily press took up the cudgels on behalf of the Foreign Secretary. Such comments, declared the Manchester Guardian, "will make most of us glad that we do belong to a 'pagan generation' if the alternative is the rule of an intolerant clericalism . . ."
The honeymooners, making themselves at home for a week in a small hotel in the tiny village of Urgeirica, ignored the rumpus. Clarissa waited anxiously for BOAC to fly from London her cosmetic case, which, somehow, in the rush, had been left behind.
* Eden got his divorce in 1950 on the grounds of his wife's desertion, after 27 years of marriage, two sons: Simon, killed in action in World War II, and Nicholas, now aide-de-camp to the Governor General of Canada.
* Though round-trip tickets may be purchased before leaving Britain. The British Ambassador to Portugal invited them to spend a weekend at the embassy, which also stretched out their funds.
* Wrote T. S. Eliot of the pagan generation: In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit, The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court, And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls."