Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont

From Raidió Teilifís Éireann:

This is the surviving eye-witness testimony of Henry Essex Edgeworth who was on the scaffold in the Place de la Concorde with Louis XVI, as the French king faced the guillotine. On that day, January 21st 1793, the king was 38 years old and Henry, was ten years his senior. A relative of the celebrated novelist Maria Edgeworth, he was born in Edgeworthstown Co. Longford in 1745. As a young man, he was educated by the Jesuits and trained for the priesthood in Toulouse in southern France. There, he met a fellow seminarian, the Cork-born Francis Moylan. After his ordination, Edgeworth became the Vicar-General of the Diocese of Paris and the confessor to the King's sister, Elizabeth in 1791. 

We know all of this because Edgeworth’s correspondence to Moylan survives and was published as a collection by a Franciscan priest, Fr Thomas R. England. The letters are an intimate portrait on the mounting tension and crisis in revolutionary France. The Catholic Church was an integral part of the French state and was criticised and denounced in the political writings and public speeches of revolutionary leaders. 

Edgeworth describes pivotal moments in the Catholic clergy's fatalistic relationship with the National Assembly. This involved the compulsory selling of Church property, the abolition of monastic vows and finally saw the introduction of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, requiring an oath of loyalty to the newly instated Civil Constitution and the Revolutionary Government. 

The collection also reveals the anguished story of how an Irish priest was requested by the Executive Council to attend the last moments of the king. The letter, dated London September 1st 1796, explains how Edgeworth stayed with the king overnight in Temple prison, administered the last rites to him and said mass. The priest rode with the king as he was paraded through the Parisian streets. He witnessed the King's hair being cut and the final blow of the blade as it sliced through the back of the King’s skull, cutting through his jaw and severing his head. Splattered with the king’s blood, Edgeworth stared down at the mob and, fearing he was next, slipped off the scaffold and escaped into the crowd. 

As Edgeworth moved tentatively, through the colossal crowd, two fellow Irishmen were watching the proceedings. The most enduring account of the guillotine on that fateful day concerns a set of Cork-born brothers, Henry and John Sheares. Synonymous with the United Irishmen movement in Cork, the Sheares brothers' drew inspiration from the ideals of the French Revolution and the social change it promised. 

Though they were later convicted of treason and executed for their part in 1798 Rebellion, it is a widely held belief that the Sheares brothers were present at the execution of the Louis XVI and that they convinced a member of the crowd closest the scaffold to dip a handkerchief in the blood of the king. Onboard a ship back to England, the brothers produced their souvenir to thrill travelling companions. Revulsed at the sight, fellow passenger, a teenaged Daniel O'Connell, is said to have turned away from both the sight of the blood-stained hankie and the use of violence as an agent of change.

Edgeworth stayed on the run for a number of years, careful not to leave France in case he was discovered. His friend Moylan tried to convince the priest, referred to only as the Abbé De Firmont, to return home to Ireland, but Edgeworth protested that he was too old at the age of nearly 50. He had spent the majority of his life in France and was now unfamiliar with Irish customs and had very poor English. (Read more.)

From Canada Free Press:

Basically, the mob violence in France in the late 1700s and in the streets of U.S. cities in in 2020 is similar. Merciless, and often senseless, mob violence usually shows similar characteristics. Mob violence and rioting can easily spin out of control and rioters can pursue destruction with great zeal to harm anything or anyone in the way, much like unleashed wild animals ravaging anything in their path. Mob justice allows no respect for law and order. In Paris, on July 14, 1789, an agitated mob acted in similar ways to anarchists and Antifa and BLM terrorist mobs in 2020. Leadership behind both of these two examples of mob terror played a key role in mobilizing and channeling the mob activity. (Read more.)

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Redefining Military Readiness

 From Amuse on X:

Hegseth articulated his vision with the clarity of a battlefield commander and the conviction of a statesman. “We cannot afford a military where standards are a function of optics rather than effectiveness,” he declared. “The battlefield is the ultimate meritocracy, and our standards must reflect that reality.” In an era when the armed forces face mounting geopolitical threats, Hegseth’s words resonate as both a warning and a call to action.

At the heart of his argument lies a simple but profound truth: the effectiveness of a military force hinges on the physical and mental capabilities of its soldiers. The crucible of combat demands extraordinary endurance, agility, and strength—attributes that cannot be compromised without jeopardizing mission success and lives. History offers no shortage of examples, from Thermopylae to the Battle of the Bulge, where the cohesion and physical readiness of troops spelled the difference between triumph and catastrophe.

Hegseth’s critics will undoubtedly invoke accusations of insensitivity or inflexibility. Yet his proposal—requiring uniform physical standards for combat roles—is neither discriminatory nor dismissive. Instead, it is a reaffirmation of the military’s primary purpose: to win wars. By applying identical benchmarks to all soldiers, regardless of gender, the military ensures that every individual in a combat unit is equally capable of bearing its immense burdens. Anything less invites unnecessary risks, breeding resentment within the ranks and eroding the cohesion vital to success. (Read more.)

 

The war behind the war. From Leo's Newsletter:

World War III, like all 21st century wars, is not being fought over ideologies. It’s being fought over energy and natural resources. Because he who controls the world’s resources will be free to impose whatever ideology he wants.

Washington and London, the epicenter of the Western liberal world order that thinks it’s admirable and virtuous to redefine God-created genders and appropriate to unleash deviant transvestites on innocent school children, is seeking to neutralize the massive resources of Russia as it ramps up its “net zero” sustainable development model of economic progress. This economic model is really just a scam designed to pilfer what remains of the middle class and further subjugate them under AI-powered government-corporate control. Hence the need for more massive data centers, which Donald Trump is being used to build across the United States with $8 billion in foreign investment from a billionaire in the United Arab Emirates.

The surveillance state cannot be built out without these data centers scooping up, processing and storing highly personal information on every citizen. But Trump is either too dumb to know this or doesn’t care because he is blinded by a naive belief that without an expanded AI America will lose its global hegemony.

The modern technocratic state is going to be based on energy and carbon credits. Fiat currencies will become a thing of the past if these global predators succeed in their plans for a one-world surveillance state, where freedom of movement becomes a distant memory. Our healthcare and even our diets will also be tightly controlled by the elitist globalist predator class, whose interests are exemplified by the World Economic Forum and other elitist organizations.

With an understanding of the ongoing war over who controls the global food and energy supplies, it becomes easy to see how the NATO-Russia war (with Ukraine as NATO’s proxy) will blow up into World War III. (Read more.)

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"King Arthur's Hall"

 From Live Science:

A structure in southwest England that's associated with King Arthur isn't medieval as scientists had long thought. Instead, it dates back more than 5,000 years, to the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, archaeologists say — thousands of years before the mythical king and his knights are said to have lived.

The scientists who were involved in recent excavations at "King Arthur's Hall," an unusual rectangular structure on the Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, used several dating techniques to establish that the hall was built between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago.

The results challenge the idea that the structure had anything to do with the mythical Arthur, who would have lived in the fifth or sixth centuries A.D. — although most historians think he didn't exist at all and, in reality, was a medieval fiction based on traditional tales. (Read more.)

 

Royal graves from the Age of Arthur. Also from Live Science:

To get to the bottom of the mystery, Dark reviewed the archaeological work previously done at thousands of burial sites from this period in the west of Britain and Ireland.  

His study suggests that the British royal graves were placed within early Christian cemeteries; and while they were marked out as those of high-status people, they seem very humble compared to ornate pagan graves and none have stones with inscriptions stating who was buried there. 

The outer enclosures vary in size and some contain up to four graves, but they are typically about 15 to 30 feet (4 to 9 meters) across and up to 30 feet (9 m) long.

"We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others," Dark said. "When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials." (Read more.)

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Trial of Louis XVI

Here is an excerpt from the trial of Louis XVI in December of 1792. It is interesting to note the brevity and acuity of the king's answers, which once again give lie to the myth that he was a weak-minded idiot. From the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room:

President. — “Louis, the French Nation accuses you of having committed a multitude of crimes to establish your tyranny, in destroying her freedom.  You have, on the 20th of June, 1789, attempted the sovereignty of the people, by suspending the assemblies of their representatives, and driving them with violence from the places of their sittings.  This is proved  in the Proces Veral set up at the Tennis-Court of Versailles by the members of the Constituent Assembly.  On the 23d of June you wanted to dictate laws to the nation — you surrounded their representatives with troops — you presented to them two royal declarations, subversive of all liberty, and ordered them to separate.  Your own declarations, and the minutes of the Assembly prove these attempts — What have you to answer?”

Louis. — “No laws were then existing to prevent me from it.”

(Read more.)

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Why the Department of Justice Must Answer to President Trump

 From Amuse on X:

During Pam Bondi’s Senate confirmation hearing, a curious bipartisan consensus emerged: the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, they argued, should be independent of the President—as if the DOJ were some mythical fourth branch of government, free to chart its own course, unbound by the Constitution’s framework. This position, though politically fashionable, is fundamentally misguided. It ignores the constitutional architecture that vests all executive power in the President, distorts the principles of accountability, and risks creating an unaccountable bureaucratic Leviathan. The Department of Justice and its Attorney General must remain under the President’s direction, as the Constitution and the unitary executive theory demand. (Read more.)

 

From The Vigilant Fox:

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi just delivered a masterful performance in her bid for US Attorney General. Democrats threw everything they had at her, but Bondi effortlessly deflected their attacks, leaving them looking like fools. One senator was triggered when Bondi refused to deny the irregularities she witnessed during the 2020 US Presidential election.

She explained, “I was on the ground in Pennsylvania, and I saw many things there… And I saw so much. No one from either side of the aisle should want there to be any issues with election integrity in our country. We should all want our elections to be free and fair, and the rules and the laws to be followed.” This response angered Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who clearly didn’t get the answer he was hoping for. (Read more.)

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Midlife Wasn’t Always a Crisis

 From Fast Company:

The history of middle age begins as far back as the eye can read. In classical Western literature, the middle of life is represented as a time to live and die magnificently. The heroes of Greek epics—Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax—are always middle-aged, and none of them loses sleep wondering about his life choices or whether his skills are falling off. Nor does Homer worry much about conveying how these men became who they are. Wily Odysseus, we can only assume, was wily pretty much from the cradle.

Beowulf, the hero of an early Anglo-Saxon poem, likewise does not show signs of slowing down until old age, when a dragon proves too much for him to kill without help from a much younger man. Embarrassing. The middle phase of life, these works imply, is the time when people are most themselves, with the greatest abundance of skill and purpose that life will ever confer.

Even Shakespeare saw midlife as little cause for anxiety. Among the “seven ages of man” described in As You Like It, middle age corresponds roughly to the part of “the justice,” a man with “fair round belly” and “wise saws” who sounds a little quaint, perhaps, but also content; it is only during the sixth age, with the approach of what Shakespeare calls “second childishness,” that a major shift occurs and quality of life starts to drop.

Then everything changed. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new bourgeois class that, when not reeling from the latest market crash, had time and money to burn. Middle-class leisure, unlike the aristocratic kind that greeted one at birth, required shifting gears, from a full-steam-ahead search for one’s place in the world to the relative stagnancy that came with having found it. This kind of whiplash was enough to make a crisis of midlife: a deep-seated feeling of anxiety about the value of one’s achievements, the meaning of existence and the proximity of death.

While the actual term “midlife crisis” was not born until 1965, thanks to 48-year-old Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques, its gestation stretched across the 18th and 19th centuries. Romantic poets such as John Keats and Percy Shelley, who died at 25 and 29, respectively, taught readers to covet the summer of life with almost desperate intensity, and even a slight chill in the air became cause for dread.

The Victorians, perhaps sensing that Britain’s empire could not stay young and virile forever, took this Romantic dread and ran with it. In the 1853 novel Little Dorrit, 41-year-old Charles Dickens portrays 41-year-old Arthur Clennam, who gloomily meditates on what he’s done with himself and how little it’s gotten him:

“‘From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother’s welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,’ said Arthur Clennam, ‘what have I found!’”

For Clennam, a jaded merchant who recently vacated his position with the family firm in search of some greater purpose, taking stock of one’s life seems a painful but necessary exercise. He also takes another kind of stock, investing in a Ponzi scheme that plunges him, with most of London, into a state of financial crisis that mirrors his personal one. (Read more.)

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King with the Pearl Earring

Charles I

Charles, Prince of Wales

From Atlas Obscura:

The showy and sizable jewel contrasted with his shy personality, but Charles refused to part with it. The earring became such a staple of his fashion that he wore it to his execution in 1649, after Oliver Cromwell put him on trial for treason. Though some claim that the jewel inspired a mob—“as soon as his head had fallen, the witnesses of the dreadful scene rushed forward, ready to imbue their hands in his blood in order to secure the royal jewel”—this was almost certainly not the case. The earring remained intact until his body was prepared for burial, when it was removed and sent to his daughter Mary. (Read more.)

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The House That DEI Built: Leadership Failures in Los Angeles

 From Amuse on X:

Take, for instance, the saga of the Santa Ynez Reservoir. In February 2024, Martin L. Adams, the outgoing LADWP veteran, took the reservoir offline for repairs to meet safe drinking water standards. With his retirement looming and Quiñones’s DEI-driven agenda taking center stage, the repair bids languished. By the time the wildfires began, the reservoir remained drained, leaving the LAFD without critical water reserves.

Quiñones’s failure to prioritize operational readiness—combined with the fact that she reported directly to Mayor Karen Bass at her own misguided insistence, rather than to Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Brian K. Williams—meant that she was the only person at City Hall aware the reservoir was empty. Mayor Bass had no idea that Quiñones’s had taken the reservoir offline much less the awareness that she would need to explain why it was so vital to refill it. However, without visibility into the broader public safety framework, Quiñones failed to grasp the critical impact of the empty reservoir on firefighting efforts. Her subsequent attempts to blame power outages for low water pressure were exposed as false, adding another layer of dysfunction to the city’s leadership. (Read more.)

 

From Edward Feser at Post-Liberal Order:

Never before have I seen block after block of the city I love razed by Dresden-like firestorms. Never before have I personally known so many people whose homes were gravely threatened, seriously damaged, or in several cases completely destroyed, by a natural disaster.

Especially distressing was another personal first – my mother having to evacuate her home as one of the larger fires spread in the direction of the neighborhood I grew up in. At the time I write this, her home now appears to be safe. My immediate family and our own home are also fine. But a couple of the smaller fires that broke out last week were, for a time, alarmingly close.

The winds were strong enough on Tuesday that there was real concern about large trees or power lines coming down around or onto our house. From Tuesday night through to Thursday, we would hear word about friends, and our hearts would break as we’d learn that one after another had had their house burn down. New fires and flare-ups seem to occur daily, and this week will bring another Santa Ana event. Nerves have not stopped jumping, and the knot in the stomach refuses to go away. (Read more.)

 

California nightmare. From Laura at The History Desk:

California is supposed to be a paradise, with all its beauty and lovely weather. But the truth will out the fiction. Like all of Earth, the state is in progress of moving north and south, simultaneously.  Thus, earthquakes. And with its mixture of deserts and mountains, hot dry winds come into town. We get those hot winds every bloody year. Some years are worse than others. But it amuses me how soon we forgot about those hot dry winds  even in the north. People have short memories, because a couple of years back, the same conditions burned forests, houses and people. All because of an area that was ill prepared to face mother nature’s grueling tests of character. People tend to think they can live in paradise without personal responsibility to keep it so. The northern voters acted like the southern voters; they voted with their emotions. Northern California needs what Southern California needs; people who will deal with reality. But talking about what needs to be done in forests does not get one elected. That is dry and boring stuff. You would think that at the very least, the politicians would put in place competent people who have the know-how to arrange things around California's edginess. 

You see what I mean when I say we have to hold the voters just as responsible as the people they put into power? The people need to ask hard questions. But they are too busy living the California dream. Make that fantasy. 

And what about those rumors? This is point #2. Something had to start the fire that rushed through Pacific Palisades. Or someone. In the north, in 2018, the beginning of the horrific Camp Fire began with the sparks from a downed PG & E power line. But that was on the individual who was in charge. According to Wikipedia, the power lines before the fire had not been checked in 6 years. But still, there were more wildfires in the mountains even after the CampFire. Some were attributed to lighting strikes. But again, since we know these things will happen, what measures are there to mitigate the destruction? (Read more.)

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