Tea at Trianon: John Carroll and His Family

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 13, 2011

John Carroll and His Family

From Stephanie Mann:

I've mentioned the Carroll family before on this blog and I include Maryland, the Calverts (Lords Baltimore), and the attempt to establish a colony in the New World where the colonists could be loyal both to their sovereign and their Church in several chapters of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation. The link between the Carrolls and the English Reformation begins with the Jesuit College of St. Omer in what is now France, but was then the Spanish Netherlands (roughly today's Belgium). Robert Parsons/Persons, SJ founded the College for the education of England Catholic boys who could not otherwise receive a Catholic education. Charles, Daniel and John all attended the College at St. Omers, which subsequently moved to Bruges, Liege and finally to Stonyhurst in England (!) because of unrest in those continental areas.

John Carroll continued his education in the Jesuit seminary and was ordained in 1769 and finally returned to Maryland as a missionary priest in 1773, after Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus. With his cousin Charles, he accompanied Samuel Chase and Benjamin Franklin to Quebec on the Continental Congress's attempt to gain French (Catholic) Canadian support for the Revolution in 1776. Once colonial independence had been won from Great Britain and eventually religious freedom assured by the Constitution, Catholics had greater freedom in the new United States of America. Read entire post.