The Sale of Charles I’s Collection

Rubens' Crucifixion, similar to the one in Henrietta Maria's Chapel at Somerset House

 

From Kings, Collectors, and Paintings in the Seventeenth Century:

 The first “authorized moves” (Haskell) may have been carried out at the end of October, 1642. Nine months after the King left London, parliamentary troops seized Windsor Castle and removed the magnificent silver plate made by Christian van Vianen for the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter lost, presumably melted down. From early 1643 onwards, more systematic confiscation and destruction followed and an inventory was made of Queen’s “hangings and household stuff.” A Rubens’s altarpiece may have been thrown in the Thames and it may have had some connection with James I’s Catholic Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert.[1] This Crucifixion by Rubens definitely hung in the Queen’s Chapel, and it seems to have been a victim of Puritan anger. It is known that instructions were given to deface “superstitious” paintings in the chapel of St James’s Palace, but it is not known which, although it looks like Rubens’s altarpiece was destroyed by an enraged Parliamentary commissioner in March 1643 on site rather than being thrown in the river.[2] Despite this vandalism, the King’s pictures survived the war “relatively unscathed.” The King’s collection became a target for the Puritans in whom it aroused anger because of the large sums spent on it, at a time when Charles was engaged in levying taxes without summoning Parliament. (Read more.)

 

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The Art of the Tariff

 From Tierney's Real News:

Trump is not going to Beijing empty-handed. He is bringing a delegation that includes leaders like Tim Cook from Apple, Elon Musk from Tesla, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and executives from Blackstone, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron Technology, Qualcomm and Visa. That is deliberate. Scott Bessent will be by his side. That is strategic.

The stick consists of using legally durable Section 301 tariffs targeting China’s core industrial strategy.

The carrot offers an immediate economic upside through purchase agreements, market access, and regulatory stability.

For China, the message is simple. If they cooperate, they stabilize their export machine. If they resist, they face tariffs that are far harder to challenge or delay. (Read more.)

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When the Royal Family Visits

From Country Life:

Any self-respecting country house numbers among its bedrooms one distinguished from all others. Details may differ — the size of the bed, the fanciness of the tassels, the richness of the silks (which may well now be in shreds) — but it matters not. What counts is that a royal personage once slept there. Even if it happened 700 years ago and your house has been rebuilt three times since, a room in which royalty once reposed is enshrined ever after.

This doesn’t mean that the visit was at all pleasurable for either host or guest. The presence of a royal bedchamber celebrates less the awe of majesty than the family’s ability to survive the often appalling jeopardy of welcoming a royal, which could all too easily result in financial ruin, social disgrace and even death. Unlike modern royals, who might show up with a maid or valet and the odd bodyguard, royal visits once meant vast retinues landing on your doorstep, including high-ranking courtiers and domestic staff, who all had to be accommodated according to their station. Edward I would even bring along a keeper of the royal cows, to ensure a supply of fresh milk.

 Hosts effectively handed over their house to their royal guests, who were attended by their own staff and would often eat in a separate room with food prepared by their own cooks. Medieval manners lingered; at their coronation banquet in 1685, James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, sat alone at a table of about 170 dishes, including 24 cold puffins and four fawns, ‘two larded’. Lord Burghley had to double the size of Theobald’s, his house in Hertfordshire, all too conveniently situated a day’s ride north out of London, to accommodate Elizabeth I and her vast entourage on her annual summer progresses. Luckily for him, he was compensated by a high and lucrative office that allowed him to pay for it all. (Read more.)

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Madame Elisabeth on the Way to Execution

Madame Élisabeth of France and her companions leave the Conciergerie for the final journey to the guillotine on May 10, 1794. Madame Élisabeth was the last to die, which means she had to watch all the others decapitated before her. They each begged for her blessing before approaching the scaffold. From This is Versailles:

Once the condemned were removed, Madame Élisabeth once again exerted herself to the comfort of her fellow-condemned. She had always been a fervently religious woman and now she encouraged those who were to die with her. She chose to rejoice in the fact that the Tribunal had not asked them to renounce their faith "only their miserable lives".

There appears to be some conjecture about when Madame Élisabeth was definitely informed of the death of Marie Antoinette. Later, Marie Thérèse would recall that they had heard her mother's sentence being cried out from the people walking beneath their windows but that they had refused to believe it. One account claims that Élisabeth had asked to see her sister-in-law after her sentencing only to be told that she had suffered the same fate. Another claims that it was only at the foot of the guillotine that she overheard a callous remark. Once it was noticed that the condemned bowed to her before their deaths, a spectator allegedly remarked that that they could "make their salaams to her all they wanted, she will share the fate of the Austrian". (Read more.)

 

From European Royal History:

She reportedly successfully comforted and strengthened the morale of her fellow prisoners before their impending execution with religious arguments, and by her own example of calmness.

Élisabeth was executed along with the 23 men and women who had been tried and condemned at the same time as she, and reportedly conversed with Mme de Senozan and Mme de Crussol on the way. In the cart taking them to their execution, and while waiting her turn, she helped several of them through the ordeal, encouraging them and reciting the De profundis until her time came. Near the Pont Neuf, the white kerchief which covered her head was blown off, and thus being the only person with bare head, she attracted special attention by the spectators, and witnesses attested that she was calm during the whole process.

 At the foot of the guillotine, there was a bench for the condemned who were to depart the cart and wait on the bench before their execution. Élisabeth departed the cart first, refusing the help of the executioner, but was to be the last to be called upon, which resulted in her witnessing the death of all the others.

Reportedly, she considerably strengthened the morale of her fellow prisoners, who all behaved with courage. When the last person before her, a man, gave her his bow, she said, “courage, and faith in the mercy of God!” and then rose to be ready for her own turn. While she was being strapped to the board, her fichu (a sort of shawl) fell off, exposing her shoulders, and she cried to the executioner “Au nom de votre mère, monsieur, couvrez-moi. (In the name of your mother, sir, cover me)”

Reportedly, her execution caused some emotion by the bystanders, who did not cry “Vive la Republique” at this occasion, which was otherwise common. The respect Élisabeth had enjoyed among the public caused concern with Robespierre, who had never wished to have her executed and who “dreaded the effect” of her death.

Her body was buried in a common grave at the Errancis Cemetery in Paris. At the time of the Restoration, her brother, Louis-Stanislas, Comte de Provence, now King Louis XVIII of France and Navarre, searched for her remains, only to discover that the bodies interred there had decomposed to a state where they could no longer be identified. Élisabeth’s remains, with that of other victims of the guillotine (including Robespierre, also buried at the Errancis Cemetery) were later placed in the Catacombs of Paris. A medallion represents her at the Basilica of Saint Denis.

Beatification

The Cause of Beatification of Élisabeth was introduced in 1924, but has not yet been completed. In 1953, she was declared a Servant of God, and in 2016, her Cause was re-opened. (Read more.)

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Update on Iran

 From Tierney's Real News:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Iran has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!), and then finally hit “pay dirt” when Barack Hussein Obama became President.

Obama was not only good to Iran, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter.

Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out — It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it.

They had never seen money like this, and never will again. It was taken off the plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn’t believe their luck. They finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President.

He was a disaster as our “Leader,” but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden! For 47 years the Iranians have been “tapping” us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, and recently wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country. They will be laughing no longer!” (Read more.)

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Centuries-old Christian Nubian Murals

 From Live Science:

Lavish clothes worn by royalty and clergy in medieval Christian Nubia have been re-created based on 1,200-year-old murals of these elite people painted in a cathedral. These costumes were made using only fabrics and dyes that were available in medieval, northeastern Africa; Nubia was located in what are now parts of Egypt and Sudan. The clothing then donned by models and presented in performances that brought onlookers to tears.

The live portrayals of these elite individuals — two kings, two royal mothers and one bishop — are a "powerful means of communication," Karel Innemée, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw who co-authored a study about the re-created Nubian costumes, told Live Science in an email. The work was published March 30 in the journal Antiquity. He recalled how, at a photo shoot at a church in The Hague, Netherlands, Sudanese models "assumed an aristocratic demeanour when they put on the costumes, while we, the audience, were literally moved to tears when we saw them. The reactions of the audiences of the shows in Paris, Berlin, and London only confirmed this result."

 Researchers learned about the Nubian murals decades ago and by happy accident. In 1960, when construction of the Aswan High Dam started in Egypt, UNESCO launched an international campaign to find and rescue archaeological works that would soon be under the waters of the new artificial Lake Nasser. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette with a Portrait of Her Mother

Marie-Antoinette with a portrait of her mother Empress Maria Theresa, via Vive la Reine. The  portrait is being held by a female figure known as "Eugenia" or "Nobility" to whom the Queen of France is offering a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom. "Eugenia" is holding a shield with the Habsburg imperial eagle. The Queen is wearing a crown of roses. It is interesting that there is a legend of a St. Eugenia who disguised herself as a man in order to join a monastery, similar to the Pope Joan story. But I do not know if any connection with St. Eugenia is intended by the female personage garbed as a soldier. The print is dated 1780, the year of the death of the great Maria Theresa, who had to assume the responsibilities of a male ruler throughout her adult life.

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The Effort To Hide The Truth About A Stolen Election

 From AND Magazine:

Heather Honey runs an organization called Verity Vote in Pennsylvania. She is a walking encyclopedia of information on how elections are actually run in this country. In the aftermath of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Heather began to hear some very disturbing things. Put simply, she began to acquire information that in counties around the state, more votes had been counted than the number of voters who voted.

I’m not a math whiz, but I think we all understand that this is a big problem. Those two numbers – the number of people who voted and the number of votes cast – have to be the same.

Heather decided to dig in. As part of that effort, she contacted Lycoming County in northeast Pennsylvania and asked to review the CVR for the county. CVRs are spreadsheet-like digital records (raw data reports) generated by tabulator machines after ballots are scanned. They show how each ballot was interpreted (e.g., vote counts per candidate/race from each tabulator), without linking to individual voters. Access to this information is routine and typically granted informally.

The county told Heather to submit a formal right-to-know request. She did so.

The Office of the Secretary of State in Harrisburg intervened. How precisely that office was even advised of the request remains a little unclear. In any event, in response to what should have been a routine request for public information, the bureaucracy swung into action. The Secretary of State generated an opinion. The CVR for Lycoming County would not be made available. No CVR’s would be made available for any jurisdiction in Pennsylvania. Ever. (Read more.)

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‘Full of Grace’

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Open up the May issue of Washingtonian magazine, and you find a hagiographic article about Sarah McBride. McBride is the 35-year-old transgender representative from the state of Delaware, who went under the name Timothy Ryan McBride for the first 21 years of “her” life. The title of the Washingtonian profile is “Sarah, Full of Grace.”

The Washingtonian photographed McBride at the top of a lavish stairwell, a golden yellow lamp producing a saintly nimbus. The article summary reads:

The nation’s first openly trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, believes in kindness, tolerance, and reaching across the aisle. But in the face of vilification from the right—and some disappointment from the left—her faith his being tested.

In other words, the Washingtonian is comparing a person suffering from gender dysphoria, a man who insists on dressing like a woman and using women’s private spaces like bathrooms and showers, to the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Actually, they may be comparing McBride to Joan of Arc. Writer Sylvie McNamara describes how two weeks after being elected in 2024, McBride discovered that Republicans on Capitol Hill had passed a rule restricting bathroom use in the Capitol to those whose sex at birth matched the restroom they use. McBride complied with the rule, angering left-wing activists. “I think the thing I am proudest of is that in the face of a very concerted effort to try and derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and try to fight for a politics of grace.”

This is the second time in 2026 that McNamara has written about McBride for the Washingtonian. In January, she got together with McBride to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. “A freshman Democrat from Delaware—and the first out-trans member of Congress—she’s long been a proponent of ‘a politics of grace,’” McNamara then wrote of McBride, “of meeting differences with kindness and curiosity and giving people space to grow.” Then McBride said Republican leader Mike Johnson should be featured on Queer Eye.

The McBride canonization in Washingtonian is noteworthy because it reminds people that the media is not only out to lie, but to wage a spiritual war—and one that promotes evil. Sure, some people, even conservatives, might say, McBride and the bathroom issue are important, but the controversy doesn’t reach the level of, say, the war in Iran.

In fact, it does. As I once explained in an essay about the film The Exorcist, even more than geopolitical conflicts, human sexuality is a target for demonic exploitation. The point of the demonic in The Exorcist was not to levitate bodies or vomit on priests; it was to convince human beings that they are nothing but base, animalistic creatures unworthy of God’s love. To convince us of this, the demon in the film attacks people in vulgar, sexual terms, even to the point raping the victim, a young girl named Regan. The demon makes God’s beautiful design ugly, disfiguring the face of a beautiful young girl. The devil cannot create; it can only imitate and destroy. (Read more.)

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