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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We've Won. Now What?

 From Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem:

To me, Trump’s victory meant simply this: we beat them. Skirmish by skirmish, we exposed their oppressive philosophies, their abuses of power, and their ceaselessly dishonest mangling of history, news and national mythology. When they slandered Trump as Hitler, when they indicted him on wholly bogus charges, when they created movies and TV shows and novels singing the praises of government power and idiot utopianism, we shot them down one by one until half the electorate felt bold enough to reject them.

The day was ours.

So… What now?

The losers, of course, must pass through the seven stages of grief: anger, whining, blaming everyone but themselves, more whining, denial, denial, denial. Who knows if they will ever face the facts? Their philosophy was false; their policies failed; they lied and censored in an effort to maintain their power and prestige; the rotten structure collapsed on their heads. End of story. (Read more.)

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Henrietta Maria: Queen of Mary's Land

I am honored to have had an article of mine recently published in the anthology Fellowship & Fairydust: Lives, Fortune, & Honor: An Early American Anthology, edited by Avellina Balestri. From the Amazon page:

We at Fellowship & Fairydust are pleased to bring you this collection of essays, stories, and poems that span Early American history and reflect on how it continues to influence and inspire so many today, both in the United States of America and around the world. Within this issue, we strive to bring to the fore a sense of unity among diverse experiences and histories, evaluating the impact of many critical events and persons that influenced the building of this nation. We touch upon the life stories of many storied figures of the age, including George Washington, Major John André, Nathan Hale, Joseph Warren, Queen Henrietta Maria, and the Marquis de Lafayette, to name but a few. This issue also contains submissions exploring the religious developments and upheavals that shaped Early America and the experiences of soldiers serving under all banners during key conflicts such as the French & Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.

 

The following is my article on Mary Land's Queen.

A portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, for whom the state of Maryland is named, hangs in the Governor's Reception Room of the Maryland State House in Annapolis, the state capital. How an English colony like Maryland came to be named for a French Catholic princess is one of those flukes of history which no one could have foreseen or imagined, and which even today seems more like the whisper of a fairy tale than a cold fact of history.

   Half-Bourbon and half-Medici, the life of Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669) was turbulent from the beginning. Her father, the famous Henri IV, was assassinated when she was an infant. Henri IV or Henri of Navarre has been celebrated by the French people as the monarch who was the epitome of justice, kindness, and virility. The fact of his many mistresses and bastards never hindered his popularity, so great were his achievements on behalf of the French people in ending the Wars of Religion. His childless first marriage with his cousin Marguerite de Valois was annulled so that he could have legitimate offspring. He married the much younger and extremely wealthy and beautiful Italian princess Maria de' Medici in 1600. Queen Marie was devoutly Catholic and, loving her husband, suffered from his unfaithfulness. After she bore several children, Henri had Marie crowned at Notre Dame de Paris. The day after her coronation in 1610, Henri was assassinated. Marie became the Regent for her young son, Louis XIII.

   Queen Marie is often dismissed as being "stupid" in histories of the time. Henri IV would never have designated Marie to be regent in case of his death if he had thought her hopelessly ignorant and helpless. Queen Marie had great devotion to the Virgin Mary, seeing her role as being like that of the Mother of God, the conduit of power between the king and his people. Her older daughters, Elisabeth, Queen of Spain and Christine, Duchess of Savoy, had been brought up with Marian devotion and saw their roles in their adopted countries as being active rather than passive. Henrietta Maria would tackle the insurmountable task of converting the British Isles back to Catholicism in the same light. As Regent, Queen Marie chose to avoid war by making peace with the other Catholic powers of Spain and the Empire. She believed that Catholic monarchies should unite to keep Protestantism at bay. In her later years, a falling-out with her oldest son Louis XIII led to her exile and eventual death in penury in Germany.

   At fifteen years old “Henriette-Marie” was sent to marry Charles Stuart, who was a decade or so older. Queen Marie arranged the marriage because she believed there was a chance of bringing Charles I into Catholicism. Henriette-Marie was mandated by both the Pope and her brother the King of France to convert the English back to Catholicism. Meanwhile, the Catholic Faith had long been outlawed in the British Isles, so as Queen she became the principal lawbreaker. The powerful Duke of Buckingham tried to thwart her influence with her husband. England had become known as a place where queens could lose their heads. After the initial clashing of faiths, cultures and personalities, her marriage to Charles became one of the most devoted in the history of royal matches, and was blessed with nine children.

   How England became a place that was dangerous for Catholics is a topic about which volumes have been written. It started of course with Henry VIII’s break from Rome which formed the groundwork for his son Edward VI’s Protestant reform of the English church. Edward’s sister Mary I brought England back to Catholicism but in doing so she launched a fierce persecution of those Protestants who refused to reconcile with the Catholic Church. Henrietta Maria was called “Queen Mary” in England which unfortunately brought to the mind of many people the Queen who was labeled “Bloody Mary.”

   When Henry VIII’s youngest daughter Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, she reversed her sister’s pro-Catholic policies and assumed the title and authority of Supreme Head of the Church in England. In 1570 Pope St. Pius V excommunicated her and declared in the bull Regnans in Excelsis that Elizabeth was not only a heretic but her subjects were released from their allegiance to her. It was then that Elizabeth began to actively persecute Catholics. One of her most famous victims was Mary Queen of Scots who, after almost twenty years imprisonment by Elizabeth, was accused of trying to escape and take the throne of England for herself. She was beheaded in 1587.When James I, the first Stuart king of England and son of Mary Queen of Scots, inherited the throne from his cousin Elizabeth, he maintained Elizabeth’s policies against Catholics. Catholics, who had been hoping for more freedom under James, were bitterly disappointed. On November 5, 1605 a group of Catholic conspirators centered around Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby tried to blow up Westminster Palace when Parliament was meeting with the King. After what became known as the “Gunpowder Plot” Catholicism became viewed with disgust and fear by many English people. Sadly, this explains the hostility Henrietta Maria experienced when she came to England ready to lead everyone back to the Church of Rome.

   During the troubles which led to the English Civil War, Henrietta Maria became a liability to Charles because of her religion and her meddling, both perceived and actual. But her courage and her devotion fueled the royalist cause, as she sold her jewels to raise money for arms, leading soldiers to aid her husband. While Charles I never converted to Catholicism, his relationship with his devout wife was deeply spiritual, which enhanced the intense physical passion between them. They were happiest together and with their children. Their tragedy is that they were eventually separated by the Civil Wars as their family was scattered. Their two youngest children were captives of the enemy forces. The family was never completely reunited in this world.

   Because of Charles’ great devotion to his Queen, many in England feared that she would persuade him to become a Catholic. While he did not become one, he did give in to her pleadings on behalf of her co-religionists. When the Catholic Calvert family, headed by Lord Baltimore, applied for a royal charter to found a colony in America it was granted by King Charles on June 20, 1632. The new colony was to be named “Mary’s Land” in honor of Henrietta Maria. It was hoped that Catholics would have the freedom to practice their religion there. Accompanied by the Jesuit Father Andrew White, Leonard Calvert and two hundred and twenty other settlers sailed from England in two ships, the Ark and the Dove. They landed at St. Clement's Island in southern Maryland on March 25, 1634, the feast of the Annunciation. The first Catholic Mass in the original colonies was offered there.

   What followed was one of the most peaceable colonial interactions with the Native Americans on record. Leonard Calvert bought land from the Yaocomico tribe, with whom the colonists became friendly. In 1639, after Fr. White healed the son of Chief Kittamaquund of the Piscataway tribe, the Chief and his family were baptized Catholic. The Chief took the name “Charles” in honor of Charles I, his wife was “Henrietta Maria” and their daughter became “Mary,” known in history as “Princess Mary of Maryland.” Mary was educated by Catholic settler Margaret Brent and married Margaret’s brother Giles Brent. Their descendants can be traced to the present day.

   The first “sea” battle occurred in the Chesapeake Bay in 1638 between the Calverts and a Puritan named William Claiborne. Claiborne was trying to claim Kent Island for the Virginia Colony. Charles I, however, gave it to the Calverts as part of Maryland. In 1644, during the English Civil Wars, Claiborne led an uprising against the Calverts which eventually led to them being driven out of Maryland, while the penal laws of England were imposed on Catholic Marylanders. The Church had to go underground, which it did until American Independence was finally won in 1783. Meanwhile, St. Mary’s City, the original capital of Maryland, was burned by Claiborne and the capital was moved to a place called “Providence” but renamed “Annapolis” after Queen Anne, the Protestant granddaughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. So while Henrietta Maria’s plans for England were ultimately unsuccessful and her family was practically destroyed, she returned to England during the Restoration of her son Charles II to the throne. And one of the most beautiful states of the United States bears her name to this day.

 

Purchase the novel My Queen, My Love, HERE.

Purchase the anthology HERE.

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The Quiet Erosion of Britain’s Rule of Law

 From Amuse on X:

Since the establishment of Britain’s first Sharia Council in 1982, their presence has grown to at least 85 across the UK. Operating outside the formal judicial framework, these councils primarily address family matters, including marriage, divorce, and inheritance, within the Muslim community. While proponents argue they provide culturally sensitive advice, critics see a growing parallel legal system that threatens Britain’s cohesive rule of law.

Consider the troubling inequities inherent in Sharia proceedings, where studies indicate that over 80% of cases in some councils involve women seeking divorce, often facing barriers such as required payments to obtain an Islamic divorce or being pressured to reconcile with abusive partners. Testimonies from affected women reveal systemic bias, with one reporting she was asked to provide evidence of her husband’s infidelity even after enduring years of domestic violence. These accounts highlight the pervasive inequalities within such systems. A Muslim man may divorce his wife unilaterally by declaring “Talaq” three times, while a woman must navigate a labyrinth of male-dominated tribunals for the same outcome. Prominent figures like Haitham al-Haddad have drawn scrutiny for espousing views that institutionalize gender inequality. Women seeking redress often find themselves at the mercy of councils that prioritize tradition over fairness, using religious doctrine to justify discriminatory rulings. (Read more.)

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