Tea at Trianon: 100th Anniversary of the Murder of Royal Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna

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

Thursday, July 26, 2018

100th Anniversary of the Murder of Royal Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna

Here are some photos of the granddaughter of Queen Victoria who was killed by the Bolsheviks around the same time that her younger sister Empress Alexandra and family were also murdered. From Orthodox Christianity:

“O Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” was the final prayer of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna before the black abyss of an abandoned mine swallowed her.

She went consciously to this yawning abyss, categorically refusing to leave Russia when the lawlessness began. She followed after Christ, and from that abyss the light of the Resurrection sprang forth to the eyes of her soul. What brought this aristocrat from a foreign country to the distant Ural city of Alapayevsk, her Golgotha? What gave her over to the hands of that mysterious diabolic evil in demonically possessed people? Their paths could never have crossed any earlier. She saw these people for the first and last time in her life. She met with them only in order that they might carry out that sentence pronounced by a court of unknown venue. But this is according to human judgment. And what about God’s judgment? In God’s judgment it was human judgment—“for God” or “against God”.

And Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, a former Protestant who had accepted Orthodoxy in her new homeland, in Russia, and who came to love the Orthodox Church in Russia, “even unto death”, answered to evil. No matter what sentence that newly unleashed, mad evil might have pronounced on her, she accepted it as a sentence from above, as an opportunity sent down to her to confirm in deed what constituted the meaning and content of her life.

Love for God and love for mankind was the true meaning of her life, and it led the Grand Duchess to the cross. And her cross grew and met the Cross of Christ, and became her delight. (Read more.)