Tea at Trianon: How to Elect a Holy Roman Emperor

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

Saturday, May 30, 2020

How to Elect a Holy Roman Emperor

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

In the mid-fourteenth century there were positive reforms to regulate the process and to seek to avoid disputed elections. This resulted in the Golden Bull issued by the Emperor Charles IV in 1346, and which underpinned all subsequent elections down to the last, of Emperor Francis II, in 1792. The good Wikipedia account of it is to be seen at Golden Bull of 1356

The provision that after thirty days the seven Electors should be reduced to bread and water for their diet is reminiscent of the similar provision, but after a shorter time, to reducing the Cardinal electors to a similarly straitened regime in Papal Conclaves in Pope Gregory X’s ‘Ubi Periculum’ of 1274. This having been disregarded in the next few elections was formally made the law of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298. The Wikipedia entry about that can be read at Ubi periculum. It has basically regulated Papal elections ever since.

Thus the two governing institutions - at least in the minds of successive Popes and Emperors - of Christendom successfully stabilised their processes of election and succession in that period of transition as both faced greater challenges with the increasing confidence of the national monarchies and civic republics of that era. (Read more.)