Tea at Trianon: Chesterton’s Secret People

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

Friday, September 7, 2018

Chesterton’s Secret People

From Regina Magazine:

The recusant families of England are famous for both their wealth and intransigent adherence to the Faith through the centuries of brutal repression. Many of the high aristocracy trace their lineage back to the Norman French who invaded the island in 1066, though recusants can also be found among ordinary people and the country squires in remote villages in the North unreached by the Crown. For hundreds of years, these families paid astronomic sums to the Crown in order to be allowed to practice their religion. Their unofficial leader has always been the Duke of Norfolk, a hereditary dukedom based in the diocese of Arundel. The Duke has stepped in at various critical points, for example in the depths of World War II Nazi bombing of Birmingham, to quietly arrange to move John Henry Newman’s Oratory School to safety on 600 bucolic acres in Berkshire. (When the next Monarch is crowned, it will be the Duke who will be in charge of the coronation, a responsibility traditionally entrusted to him, regardless of his religion.)

Catholicism attracted famous converts in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, mainly intellectuals who found themselves kneeling alongside the Irish servant class in the pews of the Church. Today, converts still find their fascinating way to Holy Mother Church, often through the Latin Masses that were permitted by special indult from Pope Paul VI in 1971. This was in response to a letter penned by Evelyn Waugh and signed by a host of English luminaries, including the redoubtable Anglican Dame Agatha Christie. (Legend has it that Paul VI was a fan of detective fiction; hence the indult.) (Read more.)