Christmas Every Day

1734 Execution of a Québec slave

Marie-Joseph Angélique was a black slave from the Portuguese island of Madeira. She was sold to a Fleming who brought her to New England before selling her in 1725 to a Québec merchant living in Montreal. She served in the household of François Poulin de Francheville and his wife where she developed a reputation for disobedience and being difficult to control. In February 1734, she attempted to flee to New England with a white servant, Claude Thibaut, but they were captured and returned to her owner. Fearful that she would be sold again, possibly to a far harder life in the West Indies, Angélique vowed to escape again.

On the evening of April 10, inhabitants of Montreal discovered that fire was spreading through the town, a blaze that destroyed the local hospital and 45 houses. Rumours immediately linked Angélique and Thibaut to arson; she was arrested and he fled, never to be found. Though no witnesses linked her to the fire, her reputation and her attempted escape convinced the court that she was guilty. She was sentenced to die in the usual manner of arsonists:

Convicted of Having set fire to the house of dame francheville Causing the Burning of a portion of the city. In Reparation for which we have Condemned her to make honourable amends Disrobed, a Noose around her Neck, and carrying In her hands a flaming torch weighing two pounds before the main door and Entrance of the parish Church of This city where She will be taken And Led, by the executioner of the high Court, in a Tumbrel used for garbage, with an Inscription Front And Back, with the word, Incendiary, And there, bare-headed, And On her Knees, will declare that She maliciously set the fire And Caused the Said Burning, for which She repents And Asks Forgiveness from the Crown And Court, and this done, will have her fist Severed On a stake Erected in front of the Said Church. Following which, she will be led by the said Executioner in the same tumbrel to the Public Place to there Be bound to the Stake with iron shackles And Burned alive, her Body then Reduced To Ashes And Cast to the Wind, her Belongings taken And Remanded to the King, the said accused having previously been subjected to torture in the ordinary And Extraordinary ways in order to have her Reveal her Accomplices.

Though a judicial review changed her sentence from mutilation and burning to death by hanging, she was also required to undergo torture to get her to name her accomplices. The official torturer, also a black slave, broke her leg in a device known as “the boot” but, despite her pain, she maintained she had acted alone. On this day in 1734 she was hanged, with her body burnt and her ashes scattered.

Recent historians have claimed that she was either innocent, or acted out of rebellion against slavery. A street in Montreal in now named after her.

1566 The birth of James VI and I

James VI of Scotland and James I of England was one of the longest reigning of British monarchs, succeeding to the throne as a baby. He was superbly educated, an author of poetry, political theory, and a book on witchcraft (in which he was a believer) but he was also a coward, crude of speech, and given to expensive love affairs with male courtiers. Of him Chambers Book of Days says:

King James—so learned, yet so childish; so grotesque, yet so arbitrary; so sagacious, yet so weak- ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ as Henry IV termed him—does not personally occupy a high place in the national regards; but by the accident of birth and the current of events he was certainly a personage of vast importance to these islands. To him, probably, it is owing that there is such a thing as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland among the states of Europe.

This sovereign, the son of Henry Lord Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, was born on the 19^th of June 1566, in a small room in the ancient palace within Edinburgh Castle. We know how it was—namely, for security—that the queen selected Edinburgh Castle for her expected accouchement; but it is impossible to imagine by what principle of selection she chose that this event should take place in a room not above eight feet square. There, however, is the room still shown, to the wonder of everybody who sees it. The young prince was ushered into the world between nine and ten in the morning, and Sir James Melville instantly mounted horse to convey the news of the birth of an heir-apparent of Scotland, and heir-presumptive of England, to Queen Elizabeth.

Darnley came at two in the afternoon to see his royal spouse and his child. ‘My lord,’ said Mary, ‘God has given us a son.’ Partially uncovering the infant’s face, she added a protest that it was his, and no other man’s son. Then, turning to an English gentleman present, she said, ‘This is the son who I hope shall first unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England.’ Sir William Stanley said, ‘Why, madam, shall he succeed before your majesty and his father?’ ‘Alas!’ answered Mary, ‘his father has broken to me;’ alluding to his joining the murderous conspiracy against Mary’s secretary David Rizzio [who had stirred up Darnley to jealousy]. ‘Sweet madam,’ said Darnley, ‘is this the promise you made that, you would forget and forgive all?’ ‘I have forgiven all,’ said the queen. ‘but will never forget. What if Fawdonside’s pistol had shot? [She had been held at gunpoint while Rizzio was knifed to death in front of her.] What world have become of him and me both?’ ‘Madam,’ said Darnley, ‘these things are past.’ ‘Then,’ said the queen, ‘let them go’.

The Queen, however, did not let those things go. Before too long she conspired to have Darnley murdered and then married his killer — for these crimes she was deposed by the Scottish nobility and baby James crowned in her place. She fled to England and never saw her child again; she would be executed after 20 years of imprisonment by Elizabeth I. In 1603 James would succeed his mother’s killer and become king of both England and Scotland.

1462 The Night Attack on Mehmet the Conqueror

When your nickname is Vlad the Impaler, and you are the inspiration for the bloodsucking Count Dracula, it is hard to imagine that you have a loyal historical following. In fact, Vlad III Drakulya, Prince of Wallachia, is a hero in the Christian lands of the Balkans which, in the fifteenth century, were being overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Vlad had his little ways —  such as nailing turbans to the heads of Turkish emissaries and impaling or burning his less enthusiastic subjects — but his resistance to the Turks made him a folk hero.

In 1453, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which had been for centuries a barrier to the expansion of Islam into Eastern Europe, fell to the forces of Mehmet II, nicknamed the Conqueror. Mehmet then turned on the minor princes of the Balkans — Serbs, Croats, Saxons, Albanians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, etc. — and demanded that they become his vassals. Most saw no option and paid tribute to the Turks, often serving in their armies. Like so many others, Vlad did the same, for a time, but by 1461 he had ceased to acknowledge the lordship of Mehmet and turned to the Catholic Hungarians for aid. Mehmet responded by invading Wallachia with a huge army of perhaps 150,000 men.

On the night of June 16-17 Vlad launched a night attack on Mehmet’s camp, hoping to capture or kill him. Fortunately for the Turks, the Wallachians struck at the tents of the emperor’s advisers and missed their main target. Vlad withdrew and Mehmet followed him to the vicinity of the town of Târgoviște. There they discovered a mass atrocity, designed to daunt the Turks. According to a contemporary Greek historian:

The sultan’s army entered into the area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades long and seven stades wide [about an acre in size]. There were large stakes there on which, as it was said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to govern his realm and its people. And he said that a man who had done such things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.

The Turks abandoned that campaign but continued to rack up victories in the Balkans. The treacherous politics of the area saw Vlad arrested by his fellow Christians and then restored briefly to power. He died in 1466 fighting the Turks who sent his head to Constantinople.

“Bloomsday”

“There is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June.” So wrote Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941) in 1924. Since then, June 16th has been used by literary enthusiasts around the world to celebrate the life and works of Joyce whose novel Ulysses tells the story of one day — June 16 — in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom. (Joyce had chosen the date because it was on that day in 1904 that he had his first sexual encounter with Nora Barnacle who was to become his wife.)

Bloomsday takes many forms. In Ireland, it is often the occasion for readings, pub crawls or re-enactments of scenes in the novel. On the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982 a 30-hour dramatization of the book was broadcast by Irish radio. The day is also marked in Hungary because Bloom’s fictional father Vrag was a Hungarian Jew who migrated to Dublin. In the United States readings are often paired with the performance of Irish music, while in Trieste, Italy (where part of Ulysses was written) the Joyce Museum is the centre of Bloomsday events. On Bloomsday 2011, @Ulysses was the stage for an experimental day-long tweeting of the novel, 140 characters at a time.

1966 The Index of Prohibited Books is ended 

The invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century changed society in many ways. Books became far less difficult to produce, far less expensive, and contained content that appealed to a mass market, instead of the largely religious works that had had to be hand-copied. It also meant that dangerous ideas could now spread much more quickly than ever before. Consequently, every government soon developed heightened powers of censorship. England left the control of illicit printing to the Stationers’ Company while in Catholic Europe, the Church was charged with looking out for licentious or heretical literature. To assist local authorities with that task, the Council of Trent authorized the creation of a list of banned books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

After 1571 a Vatican department called the Congregation of the Index considered works thought to imperil the souls or morals of Catholic Europe and updated it as required. Its powers technically lay only inside the territories administered by the Church but the Index was consulted by censors working for national governments. Among those authors listed in the various editions were Protestants such as John Milton, Jean Calvin, and John Locke; scientists such as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Johannes Kepler; atheists and Deists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre; and authors such as Dante, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

A number of bureaucratic changes took place in the 20th century before the Index was finally abandoned as a continuing form of literary surveillance. Nonetheless, the future pope Benedict XVI reminded Catholics that “the Index retains its moral force despite its dissolution.”