Royal Escape from Falmouth

Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck

As a dynasty the Royal Stuarts are known for harrowing escapes, with the family of Charles I and Henrietta Maria having more than their share. As I am discovered as I wrote the second novel of the Henrietta of France trilogy, the Queen, on more than one occasion, found herself fleeing for her life. From The National Maritime Museum:

The Queen who had been suffering with pains in her limbs throughout the previous winter was now extremely ill which prompted the King to beg his elderly physican ‘Mayerne, for the love of me, go to my wife’, to attend her in Exeter.² Help was sent also from the Queen’s sister in law the Queen Regent in France and it is probable there were negotiations underway at this time for Henrietta Maria’s eventual flight to France. The Queen gave birth to a healthy baby on 16 June but her symptoms persisted causing serious concern for her life. With the Parliamentary forces advancing on Exeter, just a fortnight after giving birth and still suffering severe ill health, Henrietta Maria set out for Cornwall. Her newly born daughter had been left behind in Exeter probably considered as being too frail for the journey and entrusted by the Queen to the care of her lady in waiting and friend Anne Villiers, Lady Dalkeith.³

The Queen’s party were making for Falmouth.  ‘The Queen is this day gone towards Falmouth, intending to embark herself for France’  her secretary Henry Jermyn had written to George Digby on 30 June.⁴ Cornwall was in royalist hands and Falmouth was one of the most valuable royalist ports supplying arms and munitions for the cause and allowing trade and passage to and from the continent. It had the important anchorage of the Carrick Roads in the deep estuary at the mouth of the river Fal and was protected by the garrisons of Pendennis and St Mawes castles. The castles had been built in the reign of Henry VIII as artillery forts to protect the Carrick Roads. Pendennis, the larger of the two, on its rocky headland with an elevated position overlooking Falmouth was perfect for defence both from the land and the sea and the manor of Arwenack, seat of the Royalist Killigrew family, was nearby. Falmouth offered an ideal point of departure for the Queen’s escape. (Read more.)

 

Volume 1 of the Henrietta of France trilogy is available HERE. Volume 2 is HERE.

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Dirty Cops: Mueller, Comey, and Weissmann

 From Tierney's Real News:

For years, I trusted the FBI and DOJ to be impartial guardians of justice. Then came the Trump–Russia hoax—a three‑year circus of leaks, indictments, and process crimes that never proved the core allegation of collusion.

Digging through thousands of pages of research over the past several years opened my eyes: Robert Mueller, James Comey, and their top lieutenant Andrew Weissmann perfected what it means to be a dirty cop over decades. This article reflects my interpretation of publicly available information and court documents. This is long and complicated but necessary reading if you want to understand the total picture.

They ruined lives through withheld evidence and “gotcha” charges while shielding their own circle. Here’s their story in chronological order, straight from the file’s documented cases.

Early Roots: Mueller’s Boston Cover-Up (1980s)

People say Mueller served his country, so we should trust him implicitly. His career says otherwise.

Mueller’s career kicked off as acting U.S. Attorney in Boston during the 1980s, where he directly oversaw the FBI’s catastrophic handling of mobster Whitey Bulger. FBI handler John Connolly actively protected Bulger while the gangster committed at least 19 murders, yet Connolly coerced innocent men like Joseph Salvati into prison on fabricated testimony from turncoats.

Two of those framed men died behind bars before their names were cleared. Courts later determined the FBI had deliberately buried exculpatory evidence, leading to over $100 million in taxpayer-funded settlements for the victims’ families. Critics argue Mueller’s office either ignored these red flags or actively enabled the corruption, establishing an early pattern: protect powerful insiders like Bulger, frame expendable outsiders, and pay no personal or institutional price for the scandal.

Bulger was later killed in prison under mysterious circumstances—some observers have speculated it happened just as he was poised to talk about his past FBI dealings. Coincidence? You decide.

Mueller was nominated by President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, confirmed unanimously by the Senate (98-0) on August 2, 2001, and officially sworn in as FBI Director on September 4, 2001—just one week before the 9/11 attacks.

This timing often gets highlighted in critiques of his tenure, as he immediately oversaw the post-9/11 FBI transformation amid massive scrutiny. (Read more.)

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Conservatives Have Failed at Culture

 Well, at least one of my books has been made into a film. I never received a cent, however. From Splice Today:

Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.

Wealthy people like Ben Shapiro won’t even fund the arts that could change the culture. Writing for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel once explored how the American masses embraced the art in the 1950s even as philanthropists and gatekeepers were offering the best of Western culture. Americans at the time, wrote Siegel, “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.

In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”

Siegel notes there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early-1950s.

John F. Kennedy supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” (Read more.)

From The Chivalry Guild:

I often read complaints about the failure of Hollywood to bring the life of Richard the Lionheart or Scanderbeg or Godfrey of Bouillon to the screen in a blockbuster epic.1 It certainly sounds like a grand idea—but always be careful what you wish for. Even if the studios could be trusted to depict the hero as heroic (rather than “problematic,” perverted, or overrated) and show his cause to be just (rather than brutal Christian aggression against noble Muslim victims), little subversions still have a way of creeping into the projects and undermining the whole thing—democratic cliches, enlightened pieties. Then there’s the question of quality. Truly getting Richard right would require a director with elite vision, a screenwriter with a deft touch and knowledge of the past, an actor who could credibly pass as one of the greatest men who ever lived, and more—and the likelihood of all these pieces coming together are increasingly slim. More likely they would just make him a toxic mediocrity and/or a repressed homosexual.

Would you rather have a C- version of the hero or no movie at all?

With every passing year I grow less and less interested in shows and movies. My divorce from Hollywood is certainly made easier as everything on the screen turns embarrassingly shoddy and emotionally manipulative—an inevitable consequence of frenzy for sidelining talented white men in favor of DEI hires. But I’ve come to suspect something larger at work than just declining skill and political machinations. The current embarrassments are likely more of a feature than a bug, the kind of thing that can’t really be solved by simply putting “based” people in charge of the studios.2 (Read more.)

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Remembering the Past in Restoration France: An Expiatory Chapel for Marie-Antoinette

The recreated prison cell of the Queen

The actual prison cell of the Queen

 From Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide:

After its restoration, the Conciergerie in Paris w­­­­­as reopened to the public in 1989, the year of the "Bicentenaire" celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.[1] The new historical museum of the Conciergerie, formerly the most famous prison in France, offers visitors an almost authentic look at the conditions of living—or rather dying—during the revolutionary Terreur, the period of violence and mass executions that started in September 1793 and ended in July 1794 with the "Thermidorian Reaction." Visiting the Conciergerie today, one enters the gloomy atmosphere of 18th-century crime, grim with punishment and death, reminiscent of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. Visitors are faced with life-sized figures of incarcerated men in small dark cells recalling some well-known and, in addition, thousands of nameless victims of the Terror. The representation of one of the most famous inmates of the Conciergerie is especially striking. Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, spent the final two months of her life in this prison, before her execution on October 16th, 1793. Her figure, which can only be seen from behind, is shown sitting in a cell at a small wooden desk, guarded by a member of the National Guard (fig. 1). Contrary to its appearance, this scene is not set in the cell in which the queen was actually imprisoned, but is only meant to be an accurate reconstruction.[2] The cell in which Marie-Antoinette was imprisoned still exists, but not as a cell. In 1816, during the French Restoration era, it was transformed into a chapelle expiatoire—expiatory chapel (fig. 2). Unchanged during the Conciergerie's restoration before its reopening in 1989, it can still be visited within the prison complex. This small chapel that the newly restored Bourbon monarchy built in honor of Marie-Antoinette confronts the visitor with a staging of history that differs considerably from that of the reconstructed cell. Marie-Antoinette's chapelle expiatoire is in fact a true chapel. It consists of a very small room painted entirely in dark blue, a colored glass window reminding one of ordinary church windows, a cenotaph on one side of the room, and an altar on the other. Here we see the queen again, this time not "in person," but appearing on three paintings representing memorable events of her last days.

In the Conciergerie, the fate of Marie-Antoinette is therefore recalled in two very different ways. On the one hand, we are confronted with a setting that seems to be authentic when in fact it is not; on the other hand, the original queen's cell has been so radically changed that it no longer appears as an authentic historical site. The commemoration of the queen within the prison complex of the Conciergerie is hence somewhat contradictory: the lines between authenticity and historical falsity, between fact and fiction are not as clear as they seem to be at first glance. This deliberate delusion especially draws one's attention to the queen's expiatory chapel of 1816, which is the main subject of this article. This slightly kitsch memorial raises questions that not only concern the construction, political context, and iconography of the chapel, but also consider the notion of authenticity and the ways in which history has been staged and commemorated throughout the ages. Therefore, the focus of my article is twofold: first, I will put the queen's expiatory chapel in the political and cultural context of its creation and discuss its iconography and propaganda content. In doing so, I will also consider some other expiatory monuments of the Restoration era. Then, I will focus on the queen's chapel as a memorial and historical site. I will especially raise the question as to whether notions of authenticity had been accounted for by the authorities and artists who were involved in the chapel's construction. With this twofold approach I particularly want to broaden the art-history research perspective which until now has been focused on the iconography and political relevance of the Restoration's expiatory monuments.[3] (Read more.)

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Americans, Learn From the UK’s Grooming Gang Scandal

 From AMAC:

A grooming scandal that has been discussed for years in London is finally getting attention.

MPs and London Assembly members are demanding an urgent investigation into grooming gangs in the city. They say authorities have failed to act on reports from survivors about the systematic abuse and exploitation of girls as young as 14.

This comes after a BBC investigation uncovered stories of young women being drugged, assaulted by multiple men, and forced into sex work to pay off drug debts. These cases are similar to those in Rotherham and Rochdale, where thousands of girls were abused over many years.

The letter, signed by figures such as Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp and former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, was sent to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. It calls for the national inquiry into grooming gangs to focus on London.

Khan has been criticized for saying there were “no reports and no indication” of organized abuse in the city and for not addressing questions about whether Muslim rape gangs have operated there. Critics now accuse him of ignoring the issue.

The Metropolitan Police are reviewing 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases, with estimates suggesting that 2,000 to 3,000 involve grooming gangs. As in earlier scandals, most suspects are men of Pakistani heritage accused of targeting white English non-Muslim girls.

Grooming gangs have operated for decades and have faced little interference, with group-based child exploitation dating back to at least the mid-1970s. Authorities often overlooked these crimes while focusing on other types of child abuse. The problem became widely known in the 1990s and 2000s, but institutional failures allowed it to continue.

Nearly 100 trials and convictions have occurred in over 40 towns and cities across the U.K., including Rotherham, where more than 1,400 victims were identified between 1997 and 2013, as well as in Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, and Huddersfield.

Despite this, London’s mayor has said there are no such cases, or none on the same scale, in the capital. This has led to public anger, especially as the Metropolitan Police review thousands of old cases. (Read more.)

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How American Sexuality Was Ruined

 Disturbing. Read with discernment. From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Kinsey’s conclusion, promoted like wild fire for fifty years, relentless and geopathic by the Rockefeller-guided press, has embedded itself in our consciences, like the Rockefeller-promoted Paul Erlich and his every-word-a-lie-population bomb, climate change and the Sixth Great Extinction, all lies. Reissman’s keystone, necessary work traces that, and it is instructive to remember that Time Inc., where I was trained, is located in Rockefeller Centre. Time’s stable of magazines slowly, over time, promoted sexual libertinage as normal and the Rockefellers acted like censors on the rest of the media, stamping out anyone who objected. Reisman herself was the victim of a $50,000 a month PR campaign meant to ruin her and malign her research.

Alfred Kinsey was a barely talented biologist focused on a subspecies of wasp before the Rockefellers picked him up, almost certainly because he was part of the underground cult of people who sexually abuse children. He showed no promise otherwise. He was a sado-masochist whose family films found in the attic after his death showed him sexually and physically abusing his children. He literally masturbated himself to death - orchitis - which is associated with sado-masochistic trauma and venereal disease.

According to Reisman who made his work a life-long study, he did not complete his medical degree. He was an obsessed eugenicist, an atheist, adulterous misogynist, committed racist, a reckless bi/homosexual, addicted masturbator, masochist, pornography producer and performer, and mass pedosadist. (Read more.)

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The Queen's Agony

Her neck never stopped aching from the vise-like grip with which his short arms had locked around her, refusing to let go, as the commissaries began to drag him from her arms. His cries of "Maman! Maman!" echoed within her still. Her heart was not broken, it was gone. ~from Trianon by Elena Maria Vidal, Chapter Seven: "The Sacrifice"

On July 3, 1793, eight year old Louis XVII was forcibly removed from his mother the Queen. His sister Madame Royale later described the scene thus:

On the 3d of July, they read to us a decree of the Convention, that my brother should be separated from us, and placed in the most secure apartment of the tower. As p223soon as he heard this sentence pronounced, he threw himself into the arms of my mother, and entreated, with violent cries, than to be separated from her. My mother was stricken to the earth by this cruel order; she would not part with her son, and she actually defended, against the efforts of the officers, the bed in which she had placed him. But these men would have him, and threatened to call up the guard, and use violence. My mother exclaimed, that they had better kill her than tear the child from her. An hour was spent in resistance on her part, and in prayers and tears on the part of all of us.

At last they threatened even the lives of both him and me, and my mother's maternal tenderness at length forced her to this sacrifice. My aunt and I dressed the child, for my poor mother had no longer strength for any thing. Nevertheless, when he was dressed, she took him and delivered him herself into the hands of the officers, bathing him with her tears, foreseeing that she was never to see him again. The poor little fellow embraced us all tenderly, and was carried off in a flood of tears. My mother charged the officers to ask the council-general for permission to see her son, were it only at meals. They engaged to do so. She was overwhelmed with the sorrow of parting with him, but her horror was extreme when she heard that one Simon62 (a shoemaker by trade, whom she had seen as a municipal officer in the Temple), was the person to whom her unhappy child was confided. She asked continually to be allowed to see him, but in vain. He, on his side, cried for two whole days, and begged without intermission to be permitted to see us.

~Private Memoirs, by Madame Royale, Duchess of Angoulême, translated by John Wilson Croker. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1823, pp 223-225.

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Outrage Hypocrisy: America’s Accidental Tragedy vs. Iran’s Deliberate Atrocities

 From AMAC:

The recent U.S. Tomahawk missile strike in Iran, which reportedly killed 170 school children, has ignited a firestorm of outrage from anti-war critics. Former Clinton White House staffer Keith Boykin used the unintentional tragedy, under investigation by the Pentagon, to write off the three-week-old Iran war as “a disaster for the 170 school children” and “an unmitigated disaster for the world.”

Apart from the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian protesters killed early this year, consider Iran’s intentional history of using its children during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. To repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mobilized child soldiers — boys as young as 9 or 12 — from poor families to serve as human minesweepers. Children were promised martyrdom and given “keys to paradise” to wear around their necks. Iranian commanders sent waves of them, often tied them together with ropes to prevent retreat. They marched onto minefields and detonated explosives with their bodies, clearing paths for tanks and adult troops.

Estimates suggest as many as 500,000 children were used in this way, with tens of thousands blown to pieces or mowed down by Iraqi machine guns. Some sources suggest some 100,000 died to clear the field for tanks and soldiers. Survivors recount the horror — bound together, facing withering fire, their small bodies exploding on mines. Iran’s leaders glorified it as holy duty.

The depravity is staggering. Iran treats its own children like disposable tools, exploiting their poverty and brainwashing them with visions of post-death paradise.

What would Iran do with a nuclear bomb?

Imagine the mullahs, who chant “Death to America” and fund proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, armed with nukes and missiles. They would not hesitate to threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia, Europe and America. Iran, since the state of this war, has launched strikes against over a dozen countries, including “neutral” gulf states. (Read more.)

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The Furnished Soul

 From Becoming Noble:

Consider, by contrast, the experience of walking into a home that has been ordered around conviction. One feels it immediately, before a word is spoken: a warmth, a seriousness, a coherence. The objects communicate.

A crucifix above the door, a portrait of a grandfather on the staircase, a kneeler in the corner of a bedroom — together they compose something like a creed in material form. To enter such a house is to be consoled, even if you cannot articulate why.

The foundation of this consolation is metaphysical. Christianity, and the natural law tradition which it inherits and perfects, holds that the material world is not a blank canvas upon which we impose arbitrary meaning. It is already saturated with meaning.

Every created thing, by virtue of its existence, participates in and points toward the God who made it. Thomas Aquinas called these the vestigia Dei — the traces or footprints of God in creation. They are everywhere. In the grain of wood and the weight of stone, in the behavior of light through glass, in the structure of the human body and the rhythm of the seasons.

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

This is what makes a sacramental vision of the world possible. A sacramental world is one in which things really mean things, and it is only when this is the case that we can use them as a symbolic language to speak to one another through form, image, and metaphor.

The medieval cosmos was one in which everything was intentional and meaningful, ordered by a Creator who does nothing without purpose. The modern cosmos is one in which everything is accidental and inert, and meaning is a projection of temporary will. The difference between these two visions is perceptible in every room we inhabit.

“For since the creation of the world,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Read more.)

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