Henrietta Maria: Number One Lawbreaker

Henrietta Maria holding a butterfly

 My guest post at an amazing site called Novels Alive.

In the lone tent, waiting for victory,
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War’s ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy.
~from “Henrietta Maria” by Oscar Wilde

Henriette-Marie of France, or “Henrietta Maria,” is the protagonist of my new novel My Queen, My Love (Mayapple Books, November 25, 2021), the first of the Henrietta of France Trilogy. It is the story of the fifteen-year-old princess Henriette-Marie who is mandated by the Pope and by her brother the King of France to convert the English back to Catholicism by marrying their King, Charles I. Meanwhile, the Catholic Faith is outlawed in the British Isles, so as Queen she becomes the number one lawbreaker. The powerful Duke of Buckingham tries to thwart her growing influence with her husband. And England has become known as a place where queens lose their heads. 

[...]

As Regent, Queen Marie chose to avoid war by making peace with the other Catholic powers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. She believed that Catholic monarchies should unite to keep Protestantism at bay. She sent her youngest daughter Henriette to marry in England because she believed there was a chance of bringing Charles I into Catholicism. So at fifteen years old Henriette-Marie aka Henrietta Maria was sent to marry Charles Stuart, who was a decade or so older. The royal couple initially clashed over culture and religion. They quarreled whenever together and so avoided each other for weeks at a time. When they finally did fall in love, theirs became one of the most devoted in the history of royal marriages, and was blessed with nine children. (Read more.)

A review from Gwendalyn's Books:

Henrietta is one to root for as we see the very young bride overcome so many obstacles. Particularly because she is a devout Catholic, and by the actions of the villainess character, George Villiers.

The author take great care to include a vast amount of characters, which made for a more rewarding read for me. A book to catapult its readers into the turbulent era of England in the 1600’s. From the beginning I was hooked and read this one in a day.

Historical fiction at its finest. This was an exceptional portrait of a the wife of Charles I. Brought stunningly to life, with seamless narration and three dimensional characters, a true treasure piece of historical fiction.

E.M. Vidal meticulous research and descriptive writing, has brought one of England’s most tragic queens, Henrietta Maria, vividly to life. (Read more.)

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Britain Mourned George Floyd. Why Won't It Mourn Henry Nowak?

 From Amuse on X:

Begin, then, with the deaths a nation could not stop talking about. When George Floyd died under a Minneapolis officer’s knee in May 2020, Britain responded as though the killing had happened in Bristol rather than 4,000 miles away. The Guardian’s own survey of that summer found demonstrations in more than 260 British towns and cities, from Shetland to south Wales, with crowds of 15,000 in Manchester and well over 210,000 marchers nationwide by mid June. The future Prime Minister knelt for the cameras. This is worth dwelling on, because it proves something the British establishment now seems eager to deny about itself. It is fully capable of treating a police death on another continent as a domestic moral emergency. The machinery exists. The will exists. The question is only when it switches on.

Now set against that the case of Henry Nowak. Last December, Nowak, an 18-year-old finance student at the University of Southampton, walked home from an evening out with his football teammates and was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa with a 8.5 inch blade, one wound piercing his heart. When officers arrived, Digwa told them what prosecutors would later call a wicked lie, that he was the victim of a racist attack. The gravely wounded teenager told police he had been stabbed. They handcuffed him anyway. They arrested the dying boy on the word of the man who had killed him, and only when Nowak collapsed did they remove the cuffs and begin first aid. He died at the scene. This week a Southampton jury convicted Digwa of murder, rejecting his claims of self defence and racial provocation, and convicted his mother of assisting an offender for hiding the weapon. Hampshire’s Deputy Chief Constable apologized that Henry was handcuffed and arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness, the Independent Office for Police Conduct opened an investigation, and his reported final words, according to trial reporting and the shadow home secretary, were the three that a nation had treated as sacred only six years earlier: I can’t breathe.

Let me anticipate the first and fairest objection, because the strength of this argument depends on conceding it. The two deaths are not medically identical, and no honest observer should pretend otherwise. Floyd was wasn’t killed by the police but from a fatal overdose of fentanyl according the coroner’s report. Nowak was murdered by a private criminal, and Hampshire Police have cited a pathologist’s view that the depth of the chest wound meant officers could not have saved him even had they believed every word he said. If the claim here were that the police killed Henry Nowak in the way Democrats claimed an officer killed George Floyd, that claim would be false. But that was never the comparison worth making. The variable under examination is not the cause of death. It is the response of a society to a death, and on that variable the two cases are almost laboratory clean. (Read more.)

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Beatings, Bible and Latin: Life as a 17th Century Grammar Schoolboy

 From BBC:

Beatings, Latin translations and Bible studies - a 17th Century grammar schoolboy received a very different style of education from today's students. An exhibition at Huntingdon's former grammar school explores how teaching and learning have changed over the centuries in the Cambridgeshire town.

Curator Stuart Orme said: "Birching (beating with birch twigs) was quite common in the 17th Century and the birch was the symbol of the schoolmaster." The tiny medieval building is now the Cromwell Museum. Its former pupils included the statesman Oliver Cromwell, diarist Samuel Pepys and wartime evacuees.

Most 17th Century school teachers were priests at a time when it was seen as a part-time job, requiring only preaching on Sundays and performing wedding or funeral services, said Orme. Cromwell (1599 to 1658) attended the school between 1610 and 1616, and the local priest Thomas Beard was the future Parliamentarian leader's teacher. Beard found the duties too much, said Orme, and asked to be released in 1614, saying he was "tired with my painful occupation of teaching and would gladly now be set free" - but was not allowed to stand down. (Read more.)

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Baby Charles

 King Charles II as a baby, born on May 29, 1630 (OS). From the National Portrait Gallery:

This is the earliest known portrait of the future king. It was painted, according to the French inscription, when he was four months and fifteen days old. At this age he was described by his mother, Henrietta Maria, as 'so fat and so tall that he is taken for a year old'. The painting was probably sent to the prince's godmother and grandmother, Marie de' Medici, Queen Mother of France. The dog, held by the ear, is a toy spaniel, a breed which later came to be associated with Charles as King. (Read more.)

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A Republic Requires Restraint

From Unlicensed Punditry:

I consider myself a traditional American. I’m neither special nor exceptional because tens (maybe even hundreds) of millions of people of my age are just as traditional as I am. It isn’t so much about us, it is about what we were taught.

Of the many things I learned as I matured, one of which was manners--but what we casually call “manners” are something much more important. They are the small acts of voluntary self-restraint that make a free society possible. Standing in line without cutting, not standing up in front of others at a concert or ballgame, cleaning up after yourself in public places, obeying rules at public gatherings, yielding space to others, lowering your voice in shared environments, and simply saying “excuse me” or “thank you” are not meaningless social rituals. They are evidence that a person understands he is not the center of the universe.

So, what are we to make of the videos of subsets of black Americans twerking at college graduations, black parents blocking the views of seated attendees at these graduations and then basically telling other people to get F’ed when asked to sit down, teens doing violent “takeovers”, violent fights breaking out between patrons and employees at restaurants?

Behavior is not racial, it is cultural—and these are cultures antithetical to the legitimate culture of America.

What we are seeing now goes well beyond simple bad manners. People blast music and videos in restaurants, airports, and public transit as though everyone else has been conscripted into their personal world. Airline passengers melt down over minor inconveniences, restaurant patrons scream at employees or assault them over trivial disputes, and “prank culture” increasingly consists of harassing strangers for internet clicks. Public spaces that once operated on a basic expectation of mutual respect are increasingly treated as stages for attention-seeking, grievance, and performative outrage. Even youth sporting events, which are supposed to teach discipline and teamwork, now sometimes devolve into adults fighting referees, coaches, and one another in front of children. (Read more.)

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Islam’s Sexual Enslavement: A History in Paintings

 From Raymond Ibrahim:

Objectively speaking, the painting in question portrays a reality that has played out countless times over the centuries: African, Asiatic, and Middle Eastern Muslims have long targeted European women—so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries (see Sword and Scimitar for documentation).

Not only do elements of this phenomenon continue to this day—right smack in Europe—but there is something else, another medium besides writing, that documents this long history: countless more such paintings that feature the abduction, trafficking, and sexual enslavement of European women. Altogether they further underscore the ubiquity and notoriety of this phenomenon.

Indeed, this was such a well-known theme that many nineteenth and early twentieth century artists and painters specialized in it, often based on their own eye-witness accounts. (As one art gallery puts it, “Many … of the most important painters did travel [to the Muslim world] themselves, and what they painted was based on the sketches they had made while they were there…”)

Below are just 20 such paintings (there are many more). Aside from noting the artist’s name, year of painting, and, where possible, title—information which is often difficult to ascertain—I’ve limited my remarks to important asides and clarifications, mostly in the first few paintings, leaving the rest to speak for themselves. (Read more.)

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Modern Americans Work More than Medieval Peasants

From Nancy Bilyeau at the Vintage News:

“Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all,” wrote Schor in her book. “Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent – called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner.” 

Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. 

Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, no doubt, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. 

The Catholic Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off to celebrate, “and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment,” according to Business Insider. “There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.” 

In fact, Schor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. “All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year,” she wrote in her book. “And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.” (Read more.)

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How Comrade Mamdani Will Appropriate Private Real Estate In New York City

 From AND Magazine:

Lest you think this is an exaggeration, here are some quotes by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s point person on housing:

“Private property, including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

“Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” ·

“For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good, and we are going to, in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently... Families, especially White families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

Cea hasn’t stopped at simply identifying the problem, however. She has been remarkably up front about exactly how to destroy the horrible capitalist, racist, cisgendered edifice she so detests.

“But investment in enforcement is not in itself enough,” Weaver wrote. The city, as the New York Post put it in an editorial, can then pass “laws that cause real-estate values to collapse.”

You need to understand that in Weaver’s world, the city’s “lack of a profit motive” is a great advantage. The city can ignore considerations of profit and loss and use its taxing and regulatory powers to drive out private actors. It can destroy private landlords and then seize control of their assets when they are forced to flee the market.

“With its multibillion-dollar capital budget, the city has the capacity to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”

“We need to combine the power to enforce housing standards and the power to finance and acquire rental housing — two capacities the city already has.”(Read more.)

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Medieval Lepers

 From Archaeology Magazine:

Phys.org reports that Elena Fiorin of Sapienza University of Rome and her colleagues looked for mercury in samples of dental calculus taken from the remains of people buried at two medieval lepers’ hospitals, or leprosaria—Peterborough Abbey in England, which was founded in 1125, and Saint-Thomas-d’Aizier, built in the late eleventh century in Normandy, France. During the medieval period, the toxic metal was used to treat syphilis and leprosy in the form of ointments that were rubbed onto the skin. Samples of bones, teeth, and hair are usually used to test mercury levels in human remains. “Dental calculus offers a new and complementary perspective,” Fiorin said. “Because it forms in the mouth during life, it can capture substances that enter the body more directly, including medical treatments applied in or around the mouth,” she explained. The researchers also tested soil from the graves to see if mercury could have entered the dental calculus after burial, and analyzed the dental calculus of people who had been buried in non-leprosaria cemeteries in England and France. “Individuals buried in leprosaria show significantly higher mercury levels than those from other cemeteries, and our analyses indicate that this mercury was incorporated during life rather from the soil,” Fiorin said. “In addition, there is no evidence of local environmental sources, such as mining, that could explain these patterns.” Mercury detected in the soil at the leprosaria likely leached from contaminated bodies, since the levels of mercury in the dental calculus tended to be higher than those in the soil samples. The highest levels of mercury were found in the remains of two individuals who had been buried in a leprosarium chapel, perhaps indicating that they were elites with access to more medical treatment. Read the original scholarly article about this research in the Journal of Archaeological Science. To read more about chemical sampling of soil around burials, go to "Secrets of Life in the Soil." (Read more.)

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