Tea at Trianon: Ireland and Henry II

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

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Ireland and Henry II

From History Today:

In October 1171, Henry II of England landed at Waterford with an army, claiming to be ‘Lord of Ireland’ and changing forever the course of Irish history. Officially, Henry’s justification for invading Ireland was religious: the ‘reformation’ of the Irish church (although historians remain divided on whether Pope Adrian IV really issued the bull Laudabiliter authorising the annexation of Ireland). In the violence and upheaval that followed, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the Anglo-Norman adventurers who carved out fiefdoms for themselves in Ireland engaged in a religious as well as a military and political project. However, the religious dimension of Henry II’s invasion evolved into a comprehensive attempt to impose a kind of ‘devotional Englishness’ on those areas of Ireland under English control – long before the Tudor attempt to turn Ireland Protestant. Like that later project, the attempt to impose English devotional styles on Ireland was ultimately without extensive success, but it reveals much about how the English crown tried to maintain control of Ireland.

In reality, on the eve of the Anglo-Norman invasion Ireland was already in the throes of religious reform. The Synod of Ráth Breasail in 1111 moved the country from the dominance of territorial monasteries to a more conventional system of diocesan bishops, while the efforts of the reforming Archbishop of Armagh, Malachy, began to regularise Irish monasticism. Then, in 1152, the Synod of Kells made the bishops of Dublin archbishops and ended the tradition of the diocese of Dublin’s dependence on Canterbury. This was an anomaly that had come about when the Norse kingdom of Dublin converted to Christianity in the 11th century under the influence of the English church. Yet the removal of England’s only ecclesiastical foothold in Ireland provided one pretext for Henry’s invasion almost 20 years later. (Read more.)