Charles II: The Great Fire of London’s Forgotten Hero

 

From History Answers:

In the small hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy, was roused from his bed with news of a fire burning several streets away. He went to a window of his house close by London’s east wall and looked out over the city. There was, indeed, a conflagration over towards Billingsgate, but these outbreaks were quite common in the narrow streets and timber-framed houses of the capital. Pepys decided that there was nothing to worry about and returned to bed. He needed his sleep. He – and England – had enough problems to worry about without a little fire in overcrowded London city. 

After all, the nation was divided and discontented and the existing government was highly unpopular. More than six years had passed since the return of Charles II from exile in Europe and the restoration of the monarchy after the republican rule of Oliver Cromwell. The myth of England being delivered from gloomy, oppressive Puritan rule by the ‘Merry Monarch’ is well ensconced in popular perception but it is a myth. It did not take long for the mood of the capital and the country to change as the policies of the new government were implemented. 

If a week is a long time in politics, six years may seem like an eternity. Throughout the country people had seen royalist landowners settling scores with neighbours and tenants who had sided with the parliamentarians in the Civil War. The bishops, now installed or re-installed in their dioceses, rigorously enforced the new religious settlement and, as a result, 2,000 clergy who could not accept the ‘high church’ doctrines and ceremonies of the new regime were turfed out of office. Charles, who had learned his politics the hard way, was not totally behind the policies of the Restoration Parliament. He knew the importance of toleration. The French, among whom he spent most of his adult life, had a saying: ‘ne reveillez pas le chien qui dort’ – ‘don’t rouse the sleeping dog’ – and it expressed a philosophy close to Charles’ heart. However, too many of his followers were set on revenge. (Read more.)

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The Man Who Poisoned the World

 From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Man, Wednesday was satisfying. You know Fauci was repeating to himself, these doofuses won’t get anywhere near the real crime, I just have to endure this, and the DC judiciary will prevent me going to jail. They can needle at me but nothing will happen, I’m good, keep repeating the noble lie, the noble lie, the noble lie. I am Dr. Science. I will be remembered as the Great Man of the Trump Era. I’m good. Noble lie. 

 It’s who these people are and what they do. They believe themselves to be our natural leaders and we the proles who are dumb as rocks and need their guidance. “What is truth?” they say. It’s rhetorical. “Whatever I say is truth is truth”, they answer. The Science is whatever I say it is. White supremacy is the real evil. Men can have periods and babies, the only thing holding back people of color is prejudice not incapacity and culture. Climate change is catastrophic. We have to cap and pay and pay and pay. The Sixth Great Extinction is happening before our eyes. No other truth is allowed. Oh yeah, and whites are evil. White Anglo males are the locus of pure evil.

Yeah, we believe nothing, buster. Nothing. ‘The Science’ is dead. Trust in public institutions, especially health, is dead. We don’t believe NOAA, we don’t believe the United Nations. We know the World Economic Forum is filled with extractive demons. The rules-based order was created with our money and is also garbage. All the institutions are filled with unethical success-heads who would do anything to keep their jobs. No one is noble. Everyone is corrupt. The Senate is corrupt. The Judiciary is corrupt. The Democrats are corrupt. The Socials are fully corrupt. The Science is whatever you need to prosecute your perverse plans.

Luckily, there is the rough justice of nature. (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

On July 29th, Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing room, surrounded by lawyers, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times. He had been subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul, who two days earlier had released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic diaries. The man who spent three years telling Americans that questioning him was questioning science declined to answer questions about what he had done. That image is arresting on its own. But it does not explain anything, and explanation is what has been missing.

Consider the strange shape of the Fauci controversy. For five years, investigators have accumulated an enormous quantity of material. There are grant documents, emails, inspector general findings, congressional depositions, failed predictions, guidance that reversed itself without acknowledgment, and evidence of pressure on dissenting scientists. What there has not been is a coherent account of why. Critics have generally settled for one of two stories, neither satisfying. Either Fauci was an ordinary bureaucrat who made ordinary errors under pressure, which fails to explain the pattern in those errors, or he was a cartoon villain executing a plot, which fails because no document shows anyone planning anything of the kind. Jeffrey Tucker has now supplied the missing piece, and it is worth understanding why his account deserves attention.

Tucker is not a newcomer to this subject. He is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, a research organization he established in 2021 specifically to document the consequences of pandemic policy. Before that, he spent decades in economics publishing, working closely with Murray Rothbard, running the Mises Institute’s book program, and writing for the Epoch Times. In 2020, he helped organize the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration at the American Institute for Economic Research, which put him in the room with the scientists Fauci’s circle set out to destroy. He has ten books to his name. More to the point, he spent nearly a full week reading all 1,141 pages of the diaries before writing about them, which is more than most commentators managed, and it shows. (Read more.)

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The European Death Wish

 From The New English Catholic:

There is a particular kind of death a civilisation can choose for itself — not conquest, not plague, but a quiet, voluntary letting go.

Europe is in the grip of it now. You can see it in the birth rate, in the open border, in the bishop who will not speak, in the historian who will not defend. This is not, at root, a crisis of policy. It is a crisis of the soul. And it begins with a simple, uncomfortable fact: there seems to be no capacity left for saving our society, for valuing our society as it is. Instead, it's being overcome by a whole series of different forces and different people.

We were in immense shock when we saw the way in which 60,000 Moroccans invaded Spain. Now, the word invasion is hugely contested. The left hate it because, of course, it is so powerful and so descriptive, and we could find some more sophisticated words — mass incursion.

But the fact is that governments exist in order to defend their people. And the kind of incursion that we’ve been experiencing, both in Spain and above all in the UK, means that there are demographic changes taking place in which the people the government are elected to defend become somebody else’s people. In other words, they’re demographically replaced.

But let’s not slip into what will appear to some people to be non-left-wing rhetoric — Let’s try to avoid the trap of right versus left. (Why should we use a political structure that grew out of which side of the French king you sat on in the 1770s in order to describe our politics?) It;s hard to know what ‘right’ is when there is nothing left to conserve.

Our politics are effectively of what we call the left, which are progressive, revolutionary, utopian: based on the fallacy that human beings are perfectible, and conformity can be enforced when refused.

What is then the non-left? Does non-left just mean everything else? There is no right or far right, as the left-leaning commentators insist, as they create a kind of opposing ‘extremist’ bogeyman fictionally in order to justify their struggle against anybody who questions their progressive values. So: left, utopian left, and non-left.

What is the real diagnosis of where we have been brought to? (Read more.)

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The Vow of Louis XIII

Ingres' painting of the "Vow" of Louis XIII in 1637, in which he dedicated his Kingdom to the Mother of God. Louis XIII was rewarded with an heir to the throne, a prince who became Louis XIV. Every year afterwards on the Assumption the King of France would lead a procession in honor of Our Lady in which he would once again place France under her protection. The Assumption was also considered the feast-day of the queens of France. Processions are still held all over France on the Assumption to honor the King's vow and the patronal feast-day of France. In 1826 Charles X, the last anointed king, had a statue made which is still carried in Paris on the feast of the Assumption. Here is the Vow of Louis XIII:

We have declared and declare that, in taking the very holy and glorious Virgin as the special protector of our Kingdom, we dedicated to her ourselves, our state, our Crown and our subjects, pleading her to inspire in us very holy behaviour and to defend this kingdom against the efforts of all its enemies, with great care, whether it may suffer under the scourge of war, or enjoy the sweetness of peace that we are asking God to deliver us with all our hears, there are no paths of grace that do not lead to paths of glory.

The Virgin of Charles X

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Zohran Mamdani's Five Government Grocery Stores

 From The Enterprise:

Consider a model home. A builder puts up 200 houses in a new subdivision and finishes exactly one of them to perfection, with good countertops, landscaping, furniture staged by a professional, and lightbulbs all matching. Nothing about that house is fake. You can walk through it, open the cabinets, stand in the shower. The deception, if there is one, lies entirely in the inference the builder wants you to draw, namely that the other 199 houses will be like this one. The model home is real and unrepresentative at the same time, and those two properties are not in tension. They are the whole point.

New York City is building five model homes and calling them grocery stores. Conservatives should understand this before the ribbon is cut, because most of us are preparing to fight the wrong battle. The standard right-of-center prediction is that municipal groceries will produce surly clerks, bare shelves, rotting produce, and a quiet bankruptcy two years in. That prediction is reasonable if you look at Baldwin, Florida, which absorbed its town grocery in 2019 and gave up in 2024, or at Kansas City, which spent roughly $17 million on Sun Fresh Market and watched it close in August of 2025 after stretches of empty shelving and security problems. Those cases are instructive. They are also, I think, about to become a trap.

David Friedberg said as much on the All-In Podcast, and the remark deserves more attention than it received. His warning was that the stores would not fail in the visible way conservatives expect, and would instead “create an incredible success story for socialism,” complete with flattering coverage, contented employees, and demands that other cities copy the model. He was right, and the reason he was right is written into the city’s own procurement documents. New York has studied the American failure cases and designed around every one of them. (Read more.)

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'Hemingway in Toronto'

 From Old Hollywood and Beyond:

“Paris in the Dark Ages,” wrote Belloc, gave way to an ‘awakening Europe’ in which “the Normans show first how true a kingdom, with peace and order and unity, may be established” and how “Rome did not die; it was transformed” and how “the philosophy of the Empire had been touched with mysticism” and “the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intelligence, which had distinguished the philosophy of Rome.”

In its place was “medieval religion, its legends, its marvels . . . the one good counterbalance that ultimately saved the world from barbarism.”

Hemingway absorbed it all and gave it back to us, brilliantly, in The Sun Also Rises. While many think this, his debut novel, is just about drinking and debauchery, underlying that decadence is an iceberg of spiritual healing.

Its protagonist, “Jake” Barnes, is inspired by St. James—whom Mary, i.e., Our Lady of Pilar, appeared to shortly after her Assumption into Heaven. On the eve of his trip to Pamplona, Jake refers to the Paris street named for St. James as “the rigid north and south of the rue saint-Jacques.” A curious description, Stoneback thought, since there’s nothing rigid about it, unless the underlying spirituality along this medieval main street is, in fact, the whole point of the literary device.

Le long de la rue, there’s the famous Church of the Val-de-Grâce, meaning “vale of grace”—an architectural splendor King Louis XIII’s wife, Queen Anne of Austria, built to celebrate the birth of their son Louis XIV (“The Sun King”); and the adjoining monastery, later converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers, imaging Jake’s war wounds—Hemingway’s, too. Then there’s that plaque dedicated to Pamplona, a town along the Chemins Pèlerinage—the Way of St. James. (Read more.)

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How Marie Antoinette Shaped Centuries of Fashion and Design

A young Marie-Antoinette in formal court dress, which she disliked.

 

Marie-Antoinette at 19 in a formal court gown for a state occasion, corseted with panniers (side hoops), jewels, rouge, and very elaborate hair. Some people think this gown was what she wore to her husband's coronation.

The Queen with her two oldest children in the less formal attire she preferred.

 

There are not many of Marie-Antoinette's gowns left because the really fine ones were made into Mass vestments and donated to the Church. The other gowns were given to her ladies, particularly the lady in charge of the Queen's clothes, who could then sell the gowns for extra income. From History:

“Court fashion was highly prescribed. Marie Antoinette wanted to break free of that and express herself,” says Jeffrey Mayer, professor of fashion history at Syracuse University. Her style signaled a departure from the Baroque era (17th–18th century), which was defined by lavish ornamentation. Instead, she embraced "an elegant, fresh, feminine style, made provocatively modern,” says Cox.

Inspired by Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the queen embraced all things pastoral. She regularly used printed cottons such as toile de Jouy, a fabric depicting monochromatic pastoral scenes. Her playful style drew from the Rococo movement, an 18th-century decorative trend that featured curved lines, pastels, wooden marquetry, ribbons and florals. Marie Antoinette's embrace of these motifs helped popularize the style and laid the groundwork for the “French country” aesthetic. At the Petit Trianon, the queen’s personal retreat in Versailles, she harmonized interior design with fashion. Motifs like her beloved cornflowers adorned everything from her custom tea set to her gowns. Although earlier royals used monograms, she emblazoned “M.A.” on everything from banisters to cosmetics, creating a lasting association between monograms and luxury, says Cox. 

 [...]

The palace of Versailles was open to the public (as long as you met the dress code), and visitors could tour the queen’s closet. They could also visit the Parisian shop of Rose Bertin, Antoinette’s stylist and unofficial “Minister of Fashion.” They could even commission a copy of her latest look…as long as they waited the mandated two weeks after the queen debuted it.

Bertin’s Paris shop, Le Grand Mogol (The Grand Mogul) “functioned as an early couture salon, showing new collections each season and maintaining a fully staffed workroom. This was the blueprint for the modern 'fashion house' or maison de couture,” says Mayer. (Read more.)

The young Queen with flowers replacing jewels.

At a costume ball, escorted by her brother-in-law, the Comte d'Artois (Charles X)

In simple attire, no jewels, hair unpowdered.

Marie-Antoinette in simple attire, hair unpowdered, no jewels. But the portrait was seen as being disrespectful to her queenly status.

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Our Sea Ports

 From ColonelRETJohn:

Not since World War II did we seriously show concern over the security of our ports from enemy threats.

Now with drones being used regularly to attack ships in the Black Sea, Mediterranean ports of Egypt, and the U.S. conducting its first drone attack against the Iranian Bandar Abbas Naval Base, the realization is that our own ports may be vulnerable to attack.

What’s to keep a drone from coming into Puget Sound in Washington State, New York Harbor, or the Chesapeake in Virginia and striking one of our many naval installations or container terminals?

Right now, not much.

The U.S. Coast Guard is in overdrive to figure out ways to ensure our ports are protected.

“Faced with a growing threat from uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), the USCG is seeking technology not just to detect these weapons, but to defeat them. Ports and other maritime facilities are vulnerable to this kind of attack vector, and our adversaries surely know it. The effort is being led by the Coast Guard Futures Development and Integration (FD&I) Directorate, which oversees research, modeling and simulation, technology forecasting, and field experimentation. It is part of the service’s role to protect U.S. maritime assets and comes as adversary militaries and non-state actors alike, are developing a wide array of UUVs for surveillance, strike and sabotage.”

Threat actors like Iran and China watch everything we do and try to play it back at us, so it is important that the Coast Guard comes up with solutions fast to protect our ports. (Read more.)

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The Culture of the Medieval Merchant

 From Medievalists:

Medieval merchants were far more than buyers and sellers: their need to calculate risks, communicate across borders and navigate distant markets made them some of the most knowledgeable people of their age. Commerce helped drive the spread of literacy and important developments in mathematics, accounting, law, languages and mapmaking, while the vast records merchants left behind offer unusually vivid glimpses into medieval society. Their influence also reached beyond the marketplace, as they commissioned art, collected books, wrote chronicles, governed cities and financed civic buildings. Long before the Renaissance merchant became associated with cultural patronage, medieval traders were already helping to shape Europe’s intellectual, artistic and urban worlds. (Read more.)

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