Louis XVII: The Pretenders

The Dauphin Louis-Charles (Louis XVII) and his sister Madame Royale.

 
Marie-Antoinette's younger son, her chou d'amour. 

The prince is probably three or four in this picture.

                                                     Dauphin Louis-Charles a couple of years later, at six or seven. 

                                                     Small boys wore pink in those days.

Louis XVII, the eight-year-old imprisoned monarch, was removed from his mother Marie-Antoinette in August 1792. He was abused and forced to testify against her. After his mother and aunt were killed, he was was ill and locked up. His sister Marie-Thérèse, who was upstairs, was never allowed to see him, even when he was dying. He died on June 8, 1795. Marie-Thérèse was not allowed to see his body, either, but was kept locked in her room in the Temple Prison until his body was removed.  From Ancient Origins:

By the time Marie-Thérèse was released in December 1795, rumors had already begun about the fate of Louis XVII. In what has been dubbed “the fauxdauphinomanie of the early nineteenth century,” dozens of fraudsters attempted to adopt the identity of the lost dauphin over the coming decades. While some of their stories were ludicrous, the hounding she suffered must have been unbearable.

The most successful amongst them was Jean-Marie Hervagault, who, inspired by a book published in 1800 entitled Le Cimetière de la Madeleine , copied the plot and claimed to be the lost boy-king rescued from the Temple. Meanwhile, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff claimed to have been smuggled out in a basket. His tomb in Delft was inscribed Louis XVII, roi de France et de Navarre . There were even allegations that the young king had been rescued during a royalist plot and was living in the New World. To that end Reverend Eleazer Williams, a missionary of Native American descent in Wisconsin, somehow convinced several people that he was in fact the lost king. (Read more.)

When Louis XVII died in the Temple Prison, there was no public funeral and his body was not publicly displayed. Not even his sister, who was kept in the same prison, was allowed to see him. From History:

“There is no real and legal certainty that the son of Louis XVI is dead,” wrote the Austrian diplomat, Baron von Thugut. “His death, up to now, has no other proof than the announcement in the Moniteur, along with a report drawn up on the orders of the brigands of the Convention and by people whose deposition is based on the fact that they were presented with the body of a dead child who they were told was the son of Louis Capet.”

According to Cadbury, the mystery surrounding the “orphan of the tower” led to 500 books on the subject and an Edwardian-era monthly journal. The first book, a fictional account called The Cemetery of Madeline, about Louis-Charles’s supposed escape from the tower, came out only a few years after his death. Memoirs were also written by claimants themselves, including the Historical Account of the Life of Louis XVII, dictated by an illiterate, drunken vagabond named Charles de Navarre. Even Mark Twain got into the act, writing of a transient pretending to be “the little boy dolphin” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The first claimant appeared in Châlons-sur-Marne only three years after the Dauphin’s death. The charming, handsome teenager had been found wandering the countryside and put in the local prison. For months he refused to say who he was, and then said he was a member of a non-existent ducal house. Enamored villagers became convinced the seemingly aristocratic young man was Louis-Charles, and the teen did not disabuse them of this notion. (Read more.)

 

Portrait of Louis-Charles, Dauphin of France, later known as Louis XVII.  Several years ago, some scientists have found a DNA link between the little king and the descendants of the claimant Naundorff. We discussed it on the Tea at Trianon Forum, HERE. The historical background of the mystery is explored in the novel Madame Royale.

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This Is What's Next

 From Welcome to Absurdistan:

What we are looking at on the streets of Europe, the U.K. and in the Republic of Ireland, is a revival of the culture that was deliberately replaced by a fully evil ideology. It is my opinion that this will not result in violence. Important as the rallies and protests are, what is happening is a massive cultural retrenchment based on the founding of America.

It is why there are American flags at the marches, and why so many wear a MAGA hat. MAGA is world-wide now, it will take over the entire world, including China, including Russia. Going forward in the next few years, there may be scraps on the U.K. streets with Muslim gangs but if - as Muslims did last week in England - go hunting British men with baseball bats, they will swiftly learn how Britain conquered the known world with muskets. There is simply no force on earth that can fight it. The ferocity is based in the thousand-year heritage of the northern clans and it has no match on earth, in this or any other century.

And it transferred to America slowly, relentlessly, during the 18th century, as the British oligarchs and their bankers - essentially the same vicious bastards as the ones exploiting us today - sent off all their unwanted to the colonies. These men, their character marked by their ancestral memory, formed the base of the American army and the American economy today. It is they that all the skanks and skunks, the army of migrants, “legal” immigrants, filthy Marxists, and our wretched socialist/globalist intelligentsia, who have never earned an honest dollar, are stealing from. How much? Estimated by Scott Bessent to be $1 trillion annually.

And now, today, they, we know it. We know we are human cattle being farmed by the worst people on earth, all of whom are fully, without mitigation, evil.

But they overplayed their chaos monkey hand. We are sick of violence and emotionality. They, these kids coming up, want stern common sense. They want God. They want their lives to have meaning. They want their time to be sacred again. (Read more.)

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Writing Seventeenth-century Fiction

 From The Seventeenth Century Lady:

Not a Chronos title, but reviewing Gerard Fitzgibbon’s Kingdom Overthrown: Ireland and the Battle for Europe 1688–1691 for the Irish Examiner also profoundly broadened my understanding of the 1600s, revealing it as an era of international conflict, sectarian violence, and colonial ambition. Through accounts of the Williamite-Jacobite wars in Ireland, one witnesses how Catholic and Protestant divisions were not theological disagreements at all, but a means to determine land ownership, political rights, loyalty, and often life itself. To a budding novelist, the story created a rich framework for writing about conflict. Accounts of the battles of the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick reveal not heroic romantic warfare but exhaustion, famine, mud, terror, and brutality. Fitzgibbon’s descriptions of soldiers dying slowly from musket wounds, starvation spreading after scorched-earth campaigns, and divided leadership among the Jacobites all help strip away modern romanticism about war which I strive to bring to the novel.

Recurring truths about the 17^th century kept popping up. Reputation could destroy lives. Religion shaped identity and loyalty. War was brutal and constant. Empire displaced entire populations. Survival depended on adaptability. People feared God, plague, famine, and political betrayal. Honour mattered. Bloodlines mattered. Religious identity mattered. Death was common and often sudden.

Having been provided with the building blocks of a believable historical world, dynastic ambition, war, exile, colonial expansion, and survival inside brutally unstable political systems, slowly my novel started taking shape. The sensory details contained within works I’d read were equally valuable to help me write about the texture of daily life… velvet gowns, sweat beneath brocade, banquets, candle wax. (Read more.)

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Charles I and Henrietta Maria at Oxford

 From Merton College:

The assassination of Buckingham in 1628 saved the marriage. Charles and Henrietta Maria found solace together and eight children were born between 1629 and 1644, a family famously celebrated in the portraits of Van Dyck. She developed into a discerning patron of the arts, an enthusiastic developer of houses and gardens, a confident participant in court politics and a committed patron of the Catholic cause in England. King and queen commissioned and participated in court masques that held up their mutual love as a model for the harmony of a wise king and his ordered realm. As tensions grew over Charles’s religious and fiscal policies across his three kingdoms, tensions that would lead in 1637 into a revolt in Scotland, his more anxious subjects saw in such productions evidence not of harmony, but of papist conspiracy at the heart of the court and of the queen at its head. Her elaborate baroque chapel, built by Inigo Jones at Somerset House, her cultivation of continental sacred music, her squad of French Capuchin priests, her encouragement of noble lady converts to Rome and her welcome to papal agents at court all fitted the picture.

As Charles turned reluctantly to his English Parliament to resolve the deepening crisis, criticism of the queen mounted. It was in part fear for her safety that led them to leave London in January 1642 and soon afterwards she crossed to Holland. She was both escorting her daughter to a marriage into the House of Orange and looking for support for her husband’s cause. Early in 1643, she sailed to Bridlington and set herself up at York, helping to direct the royal armies in the north, but her aim was always to re-join the king, who had made Oxford his base and Christ Church his home. Already in February she was writing to him, ‘I am in the greatest impatience in the world to join you’.

By mid-March 1643, rooms at Merton were being prepared for the queen and a route cleared between their host colleges so that king and queen could readily meet. She finally arrived on 14 July, entering the city by coach. There were speeches of welcome and the university authorities presented the queen with gloves and books of poems. Then she walked with Charles from Christ Church through one of the Canon’s gardens and ‘Corpus Christi backeside’ to Merton, where she settled into the Warden’s Lodgings at the junction of Front Quad and Fellows’ Quad. These were conveniently vacant as the Warden, Nathaniel Brent, had fled to London and sided with Parliament, which was by then busy trying to impeach the queen as well as to besiege her husband.

Henrietta Maria already knew Oxford. When she and Charles visited in August 1636, four-year-old Anthony Wood, the great chronicler of 17th-century Oxford who grew up in Postmasters Hall, saw them and remembered it for the rest of his life. Indeed, she already knew Merton, for Warden Brent had entertained the royal couple in 1629. Welcomed to the College with an oration by James Marsh, a long-serving fellow, they spent an hour in the long gallery that stretched from Brent’s lodgings along the top of Fellows’ Quad, enjoying afternoon sweetmeats.

She made her bedroom in Brent’s dining room, now the Breakfast Room, accessible from the stately carved staircase that Brent had just had built, while her entourage occupied the Queen’s Room over the Fitzjames Arch and adjoining areas. They included several servants who died at Oxford and were buried in the College Chapel – Richard North, Ellis Roberts, Mary Skevington – and the widows of aristocratic royalist captains, such as Lady Cobham and the Countess of Northampton. The Chapel hosted her Catholic services and at least one fellow, Dr John Greaves, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, was later accused of spending far too much time with her Capuchin confessors. (Read more.)

 

From the BBC:

A rare large gold coin from the reign of Charles I has fetched £54,560 at auction. The coin, known as the Triple Unite, was minted in Oxford in 1643 during the English Civil War and had the value of 60 shillings, or three pounds. It depicts the King holding a sword and an olive branch, possibly signifying his desire for peace. It sold earlier at auction house Dix Noonan Webb as part of the Micheal Gietzelt Collection. (Read more.)

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Could Iran Acquire A Nuclear Weapon – Right Now?

 From AND Magazine:

We have imposed a naval blockade of Iran. In the wake of the imposition of that blockade, Pakistan announced the opening of six land routes into Iran from its territory. Vessels now dock in Pakistan, and containers are offloaded there for overland transit into Iran. It’s a bit more tedious and labor-intensive than simply sailing into a port on the Persian Gulf, and overland transport does not substitute for super tankers when it comes to oil.

For pretty much anything else you want to send to Iran, it works just fine. We here at AND have documented time and again how the Chinese are continuing to provide the Iranians with everything they need to build drones and missiles. Are we sure they would not use the same mechanism to help the Iranians across the finish line to nuclear weapons capability?

In April 2026, Gwadar Port in Pakistan processed around 11,000 standard shipping containers. For context, the same port handled roughly 8,300 containers throughout all of 2025. A large proportion of these containers came from China. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz. It has a deepwater port that allows large cargo vessels to dock. Anything could come from China via Gwadar and then be trucked into Iran. We have done nothing to interdict any of the major overland routes.

Even if we think Beijing is too sober-minded to arm Iran with nuclear weapons, are we sure North Korea would not? What about Pakistan, or for that matter, some cabal of radical Islamic Pakistan generals in Islamabad?

North Korea has a well-documented history of assisting Iran, primarily in ballistic missile technology and related military cooperation, dating back to the 1980s. This relationship is supported by U.S. intelligence assessments, UN reports, congressional research, and open-source analyses.

North Korea operates sophisticated, long-standing transnational networks for smuggling weapons, dual-use technology, and related materiel to evade UN sanctions and generate revenue. These networks rely on front companies, diplomats, intelligence operatives, ship-to-ship transfers, and third-country facilitators. (Read more.)

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Victory of the Leper King

 From The Collector:

In his short 24-year life, Baldwin IV celebrated many victories against his long-standing rival, Saladin. But his victory at the Battle of Montgisard is undoubtedly his most famous victory. Still recalled by witnesses 80 years later, Baldwin faced impossible odds. Yet his courage and fortitude ensured the 16-year-old Leper King delivered a crushing blow to his opponent.

King Baldwin IV came to the throne in 1174, a mere 13-year-old boy following the death of his father, King Amalric. Like the other Crusader States, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was a frontier kingdom, surrounded by hostile Muslim enemies. Warfare and conflict were a fundamental part of life, and kings were required to lead their troops into battle regularly.

King Amalric had offered the kingdom strong leadership and had been, in many ways, an ideal king. The accession of a boy untested in warfare was a huge blow to the kingdom. But youth was not the only hindrance to Baldwin’s reign. Shortly after his coronation, Baldwin was diagnosed with leprosy, his illness discovered by his tutor and friend, the chronicler William, Archbishop of Tyre. (Read more.)

  

The Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Also from The Collector:

Crippled by leprosy since his teens, Baldwin IV had been a surprisingly effective king. His illness elicited compassion from his subjects, and their loyalty to their sick king was a key factor in the success of his kingship. In 1185, Baldwin finally succumbed to his illness and died. He was buried close to his father in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within two years of Baldwin’s death, the kingdom he had striven so hard to defend had fallen into the hands of his longstanding Muslim rival, Saladin. Events leading up to the Leper King’s death help explain why, after his passing, the kingdom fell, and the city was lost to Christendom forever.

Baldwin IV, the Leper King who defied a death sentence, was diagnosed shortly after his coronation in 1174. It was understood that he would not father any children to succeed him. His elder sister, Sybilla, and his younger half-sister, Isabella, were therefore central to the succession.

Sybilla married William of Montferrat in 1177, and by him she bore a son named Baldwin. Montferrat died shortly before the child’s birth, and Sybilla later married a second husband, Guy of Lusignan. By 1183, Baldwin became too ill to rule and needed a regent to govern alongside him. Guy, as his brother-in-law and the husband of the heiress to the kingdom, was the natural choice. Guy proved to be a poor military commander whom the nobles refused to follow, and Baldwin removed him from his post within weeks of his appointment.

Guy’s unpopularity meant that the prospect of him succeeding to his brother-in-law’s throne was deeply contentious. Most vocal amongst those in opposition to Guy was Raymond III of Tripoli, a cousin of Baldwin IV and a man who served as his regent on several occasions. To ensure Guy would not succeed him and thus tear the kingdom apart, Baldwin attempted to have Guy’s marriage to Sybilla annulled. But Guy’s disobedience, along with Sybilla’s refusal to leave the husband she loved, thwarted Baldwin’s plans. (Read more.)

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"Your Virtues and Your Kindness"

Our Lady (or perhaps the virtue of Faith, since she carries the cross) and Marie-Antoinette hold the Gospels for Louis XVI as he makes his coronation oath. The picture is accompanied by the following verse:

The hands of Divinity
Louis, sends you the crown
The scepter, the sword, the law gives to you
But it is your virtues and your kindness
Which assures you the throne in our hearts.

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Four Republican Senators Kill Save America Act

 From Todd Starnes:

Four Republican senators joined Democrats to kill the bill – Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine. Tuberville blasted his colleagues on social media. He said it is beyond embarrassing. He said the four rogue Republicans betrayed their constituents and they are accomplices in the Democrat Party’s Illegals First agenda. It’s not the first time this week that Republicans have gone rogue in the Senate or the House.Eighteen Republicans broke with President Trump and sided with Democrats to pass a massive Ukraine spending bill.

The legislation would provide more than $1 billion in security and reconstruction aid. And it would authorize loans of up to $8 billion for Ukraine’s defense operations. That’s your tax money. Every single penny.

That money could’ve been used to make sure your neigbhorhood is safe. They could’ve used that cash to stop the mobs of teenagers from looting your small business. Instead, the Republicans gave your hard-earned tax money to Kiev. And just a few days ago House Republicans colluded with Democrats to pass a symbolic measure to stop President Trump from taking further military action in Iran.

Recent polling data has the congressional approval rating hovering around 13 percent to 27 percent. I’m not a big polling guy – but it would be stupid not to pay at least a little attention to the mood of the electorate. (Read more.)

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Blenheim Palace: Blueprints of Power Exhibition

 From Andrea Zuvich:

My husband surprised me with a trip to Blenheim Palace last Saturday, May 30th 2026. Now, for those of you who are new to this blog, it is a very special place for me. I hadn’t been to Blenheim since 2023, and the iconic front of the building is currently heavily scaffolded, which is likely necessary, but there were still some disappointed tourists. Vanbrugh 300 The Blueprints of Power Exhibition from Saturday, 14th February 2026- 31 May 2026, is part of Vanbrugh 300, commemorating the life of the incredible Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), who was not only a brilliant architect, but a playwright of notable Restoration works, ‘The Relapse’ from 1696 and ‘The Provoked Wife’ from 1697. Vanbrugh 300 is being recognised by several historic venues, including Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, Grimsthorpe Castle, Kimbolton Castle, Seaton Delaval Hall, and Stowe Hall.

The Great Hall is currently being worked on, so the ceiling is not visible due to scaffolding, but they have added a fake copy of that ceiling, so it still looks good. This room had lots of information about the making of Blenheim and displays of the kinds of tools which were used, including this mid-to-late-17th-century folding rule: (Read more.)

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