Pro Fide Press is pleased to announce the publication of its first title. The Cross and the Crown: Chivalric Revival and the Order of St John, 1820–1910, by Craig Paterson, was published on 4 November 2026 and is now available in hardback and paperback. All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group, the successor of the hospital whose opening in 1882 the book records.
The book takes up a question the Order’s own histories have tended to answer by assertion. In 1888 Queen Victoria granted a royal charter to a body of English gentlemen who had spent more than half a century calling themselves the Knights of St John. They claimed descent from the crusading Hospitallers, styled themselves a sovereign order, and had been disowned by the Order of Malta. How did such a body come to be incorporated under the Crown, and what did the charter change?
The answer offered here is a Victorian one. The chivalric revival lent the Order its language and its emblem. The gospel of self-improvement supplied a method of teaching and examining, and the sanitary movement and the care of the wounded in war gave it its work. A monarchy remaking itself as head of the nation’s charity became its patron. From these came the St John Ambulance Association in 1877, the eye hospital in Jerusalem in 1882, and the St John Ambulance Brigade in 1887.
The argument rests on the Order’s charters, statutes and rolls, read against the romantic accounts of its chroniclers. Its conclusion is that the revived Order had founders rather than ancestors, and that its standing derived from a grant of the Crown, with the charter of 1888 as the instrument.
Hardback, ISBN 979-8-234-27699-5, US $46.00. Paperback, ISBN 979-8-234-27723-7, US $28.00. xii + 373 pages, frontispiece, bibliography and index. Both editions are available now on Amazon. Distribution through IngramSpark will follow shortly, after which libraries and booksellers will be able to order either edition by ISBN.
Order the book on Amazon, or see the book page for full details.
