Mystery of a 17th-Century Portrait

 

 From ArtNet:

It is not known when the painting entered the collection of the Sidney family, which has lived at Penshurst Place since Tudor times. However, it was first recorded at the family home in 1743 and has been on public display since 1947.

The NPG’s senior curator for research, Charlotte Bolland, has described the painting as “an incredibly early” full-length depiction of a person of African heritage in England. She told ITV that portraits were typically reserved for elite subjects “who were interested in conveying messages about themselves.” She described the portrait as particularly “ambitious and unusual” in its presentation of two young boys side-by-side.

Conservators have lifted layers of discolored varnish from the canvas, allowing the work to “really come to life,” said Bolland.

A deeper investigation into the portrait has so far included both a technical analysis, including examining pigments and using radiography to look beneath the surface, and extensive archival research to try and find hints about who the two boys might be. Speaking to the BBC, Bolland described the work as “a real collaborative effort.” Dress historians, hunting historians, and genealogists are among the experts who will weigh in. (Read more.)

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Why America is at War with Iran

 From Culturcidal:

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways. (Read more.)

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That Vulgar Necklace

 Marie-Antoinette was the victim of the entire debacle. From Country Life:

The story begins in 1772, when Louis XV commissioned an enormous diamond necklace for his maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry. For 200,000,000 livres (about £12 million today), the royal jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge were to create a rivière consisting of 647 flawless, perfectly matched diamonds; a necklace so heavy that it would have to have diamond streamers down the back to prevent the wearer from toppling forward.

In 1774, Louis XV died. Undeterred, Boehmer and Bassenge completed the necklace and, in 1778, just after war had been declared on Britain, offered it to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For whatever reason — Thomas Carlyle quotes the queen as saying ‘We have more need of seventy-fours [ships] than necklaces’ — she refused it.

For the next two years, Boehmer and Bassenge hawked the necklace around the royal courts of Europe without success. In 1781, following the birth of the dauphin, they again tried to sell it to Louis XVI — and again were rebuffed. This was the year in which Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, an impoverished and unscrupulous young woman, began to insinuate herself into royal circles by pretending to be one of Marie Antoinette’s closest confidantes. In 1783, she achieved her greatest social success when she was taken up by Cardinal de Rohan — nearly twice her age, extremely wealthy and, frankly, not that bright.

De Rohan had lost all chance of preferment, having publicly insulted Marie Antoinette’s mother. He yearned to be accepted back at court and de Valois offered to carry a letter of apology to the Queen. The forged response de Valois brought back was, unsurprisingly, encouraging. Further forged letters convinced de Rohan that the Queen was in love with him and that he should give money to de Valois, which he did. Her problem now was that the cardinal kept pressing for a meeting with sa Majesté. How relieved de Valois must have been when she encountered a prostitute, Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen and was willing, for a fee, to take part in a practical joke. (Read more.)

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Childhood of Mary Stuart

From English Historical Fiction Writers: 

Although historians often cast the dismissal of her playmates in a harsh light, Poissy was only a few miles from Saint Germain.  The Four Maries often visited the palace on weekends and holidays. They had not been exiled to an austere convent in a backwater location. The convent school at Saint Louis Priory provided a high-quality liberal education to its aristocratic students. Even religious policies were flexible to a degree. Marie Livingston, whose family embraced the new learning, was encouraged but not forced to attend Mass. By the time the Four Maries reached puberty, they were well educated and highly polished French girls, ready to be integrated into the life at the French court.  Nevertheless, their place in the life of the Queen had been taken by the Princesses Elisabeth and Claude, and their brother Francois, the Dauphin.

By the time she was eleven, the Queen of Scots might well have been homesick for her mother, but there is no reason to think she missed or even remembered the land of which she was sovereign. (Read more.)

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The Deep State Diplomats Who Failed

 From Amuse on X:

On April 15, 2026, TIME published a piece by Philip Wang carrying the headline “It’s Not Working: Diplomats Fear Trump’s Iran Envoys Are Making Things Worse.” The article rests almost entirely on three named former officials, Aaron David Miller, David Satterfield, and Robert Einhorn, who are presented as sober experts watching amateurs fumble a delicate file. The framing is familiar. The evidentiary basis is weaker than the framing suggests. It is worth walking through what these three men actually did in government, what they did not do, and what the record shows about the men they are criticizing. Once that is done, a further question comes into view. It concerns whether the category “experienced diplomat” is doing the analytical work Wang assumes it is doing, and whether, in fact, the opposite proposition may be closer to the truth.

Begin with Miller. He spent 24 years at the State Department, from 1978 to 2003, advising six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His principal file was the Syria-Israel track. That track produced no agreement during his tenure. The Camp David summit in July 2000, at which he was present, collapsed. Miller has been candid about this record. His own CNN biography describes him as having spent “a couple decades in and around failing Arab-Israeli negotiations,” and his 2008 book is titled “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” In a History News Network essay, he wrote that he knows “a thing or two about failure.” This is not a partisan characterization. It is his self-description. A reader is entitled to ask why a man who acknowledges having worked on failed negotiations for thirty years is positioned by TIME as the benchmark against which current envoys should be measured.

Consider next Satterfield. He is associated in the public mind with the Israel-Lebanon maritime border agreement, and he did work on an early framework for those talks between 2017 and 2019. But the agreement itself was signed on October 27, 2022, and it was brokered by Amos Hochstein, not by Satterfield. AIPAC credited Hochstein by name. Al Jazeera credited Hochstein by name. Satterfield was one of at least four American envoys who handled the file over a period of years, and he was not the one in the room when it closed. His more recent work is also worth noting. From October 2023 to May 2024, he served as President Biden’s Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues. In December 2024, he told CBS News that Trump was “exaggerating” Turkey’s influence over Syrian rebel forces. Wang does not disclose the Biden role or the CBS appearance to his readers.(Read more.)

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The Last Aztec Princess

From The Collector:

 When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec were ruled by Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, better and less accurately known as Moctezuma II, the powerful huey tlatoani who had expanded the empire to its greatest extent. Chroniclers marveled at his many wives, lesser wives and concubines, as well as his numerous children, with one claiming he had at least 100. History recorded just a few, however, including two sons who died during the conquest and one legitimate daughter, often called the last Aztec princess: Isabel.

Little is known for certain about Isabel’s life before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. Her birth year, which of Moctezuma’s many wives was her mother, or even the correct translation of her Nahuatl name, are unknown. Some contemporary records and documents kept by the Spanish give her birth year as 1510, which would have made her just 9 years old at the time the conquest began in 1519, and when she first married. Others describe her as a maiden, suggesting she was not a child but a girl of marriageable age, while still others indicate she was born before Moctezuma became huey tlatoani, which occurred in 1503, making her a young adult when Hernán Cortés and his contingent of conquistadors arrived.

Contemporary accounts are equally unclear about her lineage, with some suggesting she was the daughter of Moctezuma’s first wife and others indicating she was born of one of his secondary wives. Marriages were often undertaken to cement alliances with neighboring groups, while marrying within family groups to preserve the noble or semi-divine bloodline was also common, ultimately making either wife an equally likely candidate for a child considered his heir. The ruler also had many concubines, though records do seem to agree that Isabel was not the result of any of those unions; some half-siblings who would later come to challenge her status as Moctezuma’s heir were. (Read more.)

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Versailles Restores Royal Bedroom to Its 1789 Splendor

 

Louis XIV was the great-grandfather of Louis XV, not his father. From ArtNet:

The 2,300-room Palace of Versailles just outside of Paris receives a seemingly constant stream of repairs. Just last year, for instance, an American-French coalition launched a restoration inside the state apartment of Sun King Louis XIV. Elsewhere, experts have been restoring one bedroom within the King’s Private Apartments, which Louis XV built and Louis XVI used, since the 1980s. Now, that project has finally come to an end. Crews just placed the very last details replicating precisely what this princely bedroom looked like on October 6, 1789—the very day that the French royal family made its final departure from Versailles.

[...]

 This particular bedroom was built in 1728. French architect Jacques V Gabriel and his son Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who both served France’s royal family, designed the space together. Antwerp-born sculptor, cabinetmaker, and ornamentalist Jacques Verberckt, meanwhile, provided structural decorations such as the space’s impossibly delicate Rocaille embellishments, just as he did for other parts of Versailles—like, the Queen’s Room in 1730. (Read more.)

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The Panicans were Wrong

 From Tierney's Real News:

Remember, oil was $120 a barrel under Biden and the DOW never got over 42,000. Now oil is down 35% from record highs under Obama and the DOW is up 20%!

So I’m saying this once and for all: the panicans and RINO doomers were wrong—again.

Six weeks ago, “the experts” swore that Trump’s showdown with Iran would crash the stock market, send oil over $200, and drag us into a permanent war. Instead, look at the results: oil is down around $80 per barrel, the Dow is back at record highs, the Strait of Hormuz is open and safe, and Iran has agreed not to build a nuclear weapon or keep enriched uranium. Not only that, but a ceasefire is holding in Lebanon, and Israel and Lebanon are headed to the White House for talks after 34 years of silence.

Trump didn’t run from the fight; he stared down the Iranian regime, the Axis of Resistance, and the doom‑porn media—and he won. The world is less dangerous, the markets are stronger, and the “forever‑war” narrative that his critics hyped has already collapsed. (Read more.)

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We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches

 From Claremont Review of Books:

In a sense, dystopian novels are both optimistic and conservative. They are optimistic in that they do not hold the future they describe to be inevitable and unavoidable. They are conservative in that they imagine a world very much worse than our own, and therefore are an encouragement to political virtues such as prudence and realism. They remind us that, short of extermination camps or other complete disasters, we always have something to lose as well as to gain and that progress often has a dark—even a very dark—side. Perfection is not of this world.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

The plot is simple. A huge armada of rotting hulks, bearing a million impoverished and half-starved Bengalis desperate to reach Europe, which they suppose to be a land flowing with milk and honey, sets out from Calcutta and eventually reaches the south coast of France. The local population flees before this invasion, no official efforts having been made to repel it. French society collapses; the success of the armada spells the downfall of Europe, and the whole of the West, as a civilization. (Read more.)

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