Tea at Trianon: Old and New Tyrannies

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, July 15, 2018

Old and New Tyrannies

From Crisis:

Assaulting age-old truths, norms, legal and constitutional principles, political practices and structures, and even religious beliefs, and forcing people to conform for the sake of justifying sexual immorality is nothing new. Consider the Protestant Reformation in England. As one writer has stated, it happened because of King Henry VIII’s lusts. To get his divorce and to give an aura of legitimacy to his taking up with Anne Boleyn, Henry not only severed England from the Catholic Church and ushered in the long period of persecution against Catholic believers, but began a sweeping and destructive transformation of the country’s politics and law. As Professor Richard O’Sullivan wrote, at Henry’s behest, and to carry out his aims, Parliament assumed absolute power—when in fact, it was the king who had the absolute power—which went against the country’s entire previous tradition. This new governmental absolutism shredded the country’s common law tradition—and the liberty of subjects that it guaranteed—and discarded the natural law behind it.

This is why, O’Sullivan says, at St. Thomas More’s trumped up trial for treason—which at bottom, as the dramatic moment in the movie A Man for All Seasons makes clear, was because he would not accept Henry’s illicit marriage—his appealing to the common law rule that a defendant’s silence could not be used to convict him was just brushed aside. After the guilty verdict, O’Sullivan says that More castigated the law he was accused of violating, which required Henry’s subjects to take an oath acknowledging him as the head of the Church, as “contrary to the law of God, the law of reason, and the law of the land.” As O’Sullivan noted, this was a “major disruption” to the “common law thought pattern” that made all of these, in this order, the basis of English legal, political, and social life. (Read more.)