Tea at Trianon: Clues about Catholic Colonists in Maryland

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

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Clues about Catholic Colonists in Maryland

From Crux:

In 1634, the ships the Ark and the Dove landed on the shores of Maryland carrying more than 100 English Catholics and Protestants, led by the Catholic Leonard Calvert. The newcomers settled in a fort before gradually building up St. Mary’s City, a metropolis in southern Maryland that would serve as the colony’s first capital.

For decades, religious tolerance for Christians was the law of the land. But the colonists weren’t free of the political and religious strife that rocked society in Europe. In the late 1680s, England’s Glorious Revolution replaced a Catholic ruler with the staunchly Protestant King William and Queen Mary. Soon, Maryland was no longer controlled by the Catholic Calvert family but instead became a royal colony where the Church of England was the state religion.
n 1695, Francis Nicholson, the royal governor, moved the capital to Annapolis, a more centrally located city where fewer Catholics lived. St. Mary’s City became a shell of its former self, and the site of that original fort was lost to history.

Fortunately, archaeology has helped uncover much of the old city’s mysteries over the past few decades. “There was no map of St. Mary’s City, other than one map with no street layouts, no buildings, no nothing,” said Peter Friesen, director of education at the living history museum. “It’s through the 50 years of archaeology that we were able to figure out where a lot of these buildings are that we’ve reconstructed.”

One of those buildings is a Catholic church. The first group of colonists to come to Maryland included Jesuit Fathers Andrew White and John Altham, and other priests followed over the years. At first, they used an old witchott, a type of Native American dwelling, to celebrate Mass, then a wooden chapel, then a cruciform brick chapel with windows and a stone floor. But the building survived for only a few decades. (Read more.)