Tea at Trianon: Father George Leo Haydock

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, April 22, 2012

Father George Leo Haydock

A post on a great English Scripture scholar. (I highly recommend the Haydock Bible for its truly remarkable footnotes.)

George studied first at Mowbreck Hall, Wesham and then at Douai, escaping from France in 1793 when Great Britain declared war against France. He resumed his seminary studies at Crook Hall in County Durham two years before his ordination in 1798. After remaining at Crook Hall until 1803 as a professor, he was assigned to a poor parish in Ugthorpe in Yorkshire, former home of Blessed Nicholas Postgate, Popish Plot martyr, where he worked on a commentary for a new edition of Catholic English translation of the Holy Bible, the Douai-Rheims Bible. His brother Thomas published it, starting in 1811--the Haydock Bible. (Read entire post.)