In 1689 James II, King of England and Scotland, was deprived of his throne in what came to be known as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution. His desire to bring about religious toleration for Catholics (he was one) and his abuse of constitutional norms to do so united much of the political class who summoned James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William to assume rule. William and Mary died childless and were succeed by James’s other daughter Anne. When she died in 1714, the English looked about for a Protestant heir and found one in George I who became the first of the Hanoverian line.
The descendants of James II were not willing to let the Stuart claim to the throne lapse. In 1715 James the Old Pretender launched an invasion of England with French help but was repelled. In 1745, his son (the grandson of James II) Charles Edward, known as the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland and found a small army of supporters to rally around him. His men (called Jacobites after the Latin translation of James) quickly took Edinburgh, forcing the British army to try and bring him to open battle.
This they did at Prestonpans, east of the capital. The redcoats outnumbered the Scots and were better armed but the Jacobites were made of sterner stuff than the ill-trained and inexperienced Englishmen. A sudden and savage Highland charge broke their opponents in less than fifteen minutes, killing hundreds and taking even more prisoners.
Charles Stuart’s success here led him and his generals to believe that such a charge could win them more battles but the Highlanders were massacred at Culloden when they faced disciplined troops and artillery fire.
On this date, churches of the Anglican communion celebrate the life of John Patteson (1827-71), the first Bishop of Melanesia. Patterson was the great-nephew of the poet Samuel Coleridge, educated at Oxford, and ordained a priest. He was a devoted student of languages and a country curate when he was recruited in 1854 to become a missionary in the Southern Pacific.
Based in New Zealand, Patteson sailed through the island chains of Melanesia trying to spread Christianity. To enable himself for this task he learned 23 native languages, wrote grammars for these tongues and translated parts of the Gospel. His job was made immeasurably harder by the presence in those areas of “blackbirders”, essentially kidnappers from British ships who would recruit islanders as indentured labourers and treat them as slaves on plantations. Patteson’s desire to offer a boarding-school education for native youth seemed to many of the locals as just another way of taking away their young men who would never return. Despite his opposition to this slave trade Patteson was attacked on more than one occasion. On this date in 1871 Patteson was killed on an island in the Solomons; his body was found floating at sea in a canoe with a palm leaf in his hand.
His death spurred a crack-down on black-birding and steps were taken to better protect islanders. Patteson is buried in Exeter Cathedral’s Martyrs’ Pulpit.
Should you happen to be in Naples on this date, or on December 16, or on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, make it your business to drop in on the cathedral where you may be fortunate enough to see a miracle. At these times, the dried blood of St Januarius (or San Gennaro to the locals) will liquefy.
Januarius was the bishop of Naples during the time of the persecution of Christianity by the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. In 304, he was thrown to the bears and then beheaded. His relics were preserved and it was noted in 1389 that when the ampoule containing his blood was brought near the reliquary containing his head, liquefaction occurred. This miracle came to occur regularly on his saint’s day (today), the anniversary of the translation of his relics, and on the festival of his patronage of Naples.
On March 21, 2015, the blood in the vial appeared to liquify during a visit by Pope Francis. This was taken as a sign of the saint’s favour of the pope. The blood did not liquify when Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI visited nor when Naples elected a Communist mayor. Make of that what you will.
Januarius is the patron of Naples and blood banks and may be invoked against volcanic eruptions.
A celebration of that great and amiable man from Chambers’ Book of Days:
Montaigne was born in 1533, and died in 1592, his life of sixty years coinciding with one of the gloomiest eras in French history–a time of wide-spread and implacable dissensions, of civil war, massacre and murder.
The father of Montaigne was a baron of Perigord. Having found Latin a dreary and difficult study in his youth, he determined to make it an easy one for his son. He procured a tutor from Germany, ignorant of French, and gave orders that he should converse with the boy in nothing but Latin, and directed, moreover, that none of the household should address him otherwise than in that tongue. “They all became Latinised,”‘ says Montaigne; “and even the villagers in the neighbourhood learned words in that language, some of which took root in the country, and became of common use among the people.” Greek he was taught by similar artifice, feeling it a pastime rather than a task.
At the age of six, he was sent to the College of Guienne, then reputed the best in France, and, strange as it seems, his biographers relate, that at thirteen he had run through the prescribed course of studies, and completed his education. He next turned his attention to law, and at twenty-one was made conseiller, or judge, in the parliament of Bordeaux. He visited Paris, and was received at court, enjoyed the favour of Henri II, saw Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and entered fully into the delights and dissipations of gay society. At thirty-three he was married though had he been left free to his choice, he “would not have wedded with Wisdom herself had she been willing. But ’tis not much to the purpose,” he writes, “to resist custom, for the common usance of life will be so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.” Of women, indeed, he seldom speaks save in terms of easy contempt, and for the hardships of married life he has frequent jeers.
In 1571, in his thirty-eighth year, the death of his father enabled Montaigne to retire from the practice of law, and to settle on the patrimonial estate. It was predicted he would soon exhaust his fortune, but, on the contrary, he proved a good economist, and turned his farms to excellent account. His good sense, his probity, and liberal soul, won for him the esteem of his province; and though the civil wars of the League converted every house into a fort, he kept his gates open, and the neighbouring gentry brought him their jewels and papers to hold in safe-keeping. He placed his library in a tower overlooking the entrance to his court-yard, and there spent his leisure in reading, meditation, and writing. On the central rafter he inscribed: I do not understand; I pause; I examine. He took to writing for want of something to do, and having nothing else to write about, he began to write about himself, jotting down what came into his head when not too lazy. He found paper a patient listener, and excused his egotism by the consideration, that if his grandchildren were of the same mind as himself, they would he glad to know what sort of man he was. “What should I give to listen to some one who could tell me the ways, the look, the bearing, the commonest words of my ancestors!” If the world should complain that he talked too much about himself, he would answer the world that it talked and thought of everything but itself.
A volume of these egotistic gossips he published at Bordeaux in 1580, and the book quickly passed into circulation. About this time he was attacked with [kidney] stone, a disease he had held in dread from childhood, and the pleasure of the remainder of his life was broken with paroxysms of severe pain. “When they suppose me to be most cast down,” he writes, “and spare me, I often try my strength, and start subjects of conversation quite foreign to my state. I can do everything by a sudden effort, but, oh! take away duration. I am tried severely, for I have suddenly passed from a very sweet and happy condition of life, to the most painful that can be imagined.”
Abhorring doctors and drugs, he sought diversion and relief in a journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome he was kindly received by the pope and cardinals, and invested with the freedom of the city, an honour of which he was very proud. He kept a journal of this tour, which, after lying concealed in an old chest in his chateau for nearly two hundred years, was brought to light and published in 1774; and, as may be supposed, it contains a stock of curious and original information. While he was travelling, he was elected mayor of Bordeaux, an office for which he had no inclination, but Henry III insisted that he should accept it, and at the end of two years he was re-elected for the same period.
During a visit to Paris, he became acquainted with Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady who had conceived an ardent friendship for him through reading his Essays. She visited him, accompanied by her mother, and he reciprocated her attachment by treating her as his daughter. Meanwhile, his health grew worse, and feeling his end was drawing near, and sick of the intolerance and bloodshed which devastated France, he kept at home, correcting and retouching his writings. A quinsy [throat infection] terminated his life. He gathered his friends round his bedside, and bade them farewell. A priest said mass, and at the elevation of the host he raised himself in bed, and with hands clasped in prayer, expired. Mademoiselle de Gournay and her mother crossed half France, risking the perils of the roads, that they might condole with his widow and daughter.
It is superfluous to praise Montaigne’s Essays; they have long passed the ordeal of time into assured immortality. He was one of the earliest discoverers of the power and genius of the French language, and may he said to have been the inventor of that charming form of literature—the essay. At a time when authorship was stiff, solemn, and exhaustive, confined to Latin and the learned, he broke into the vernacular, and wrote for everybody with the ease and nonchalance of conversation. The Essays furnish a rambling auto-biography of their author, and not even Rousseau turned himself inside out with more completeness. He gives, with inimitable candour, an account of his likes and dislikes, his habits, foibles, and virtues. He pretends to most of the vices; and if there be any goodness in him, he says he got it by stealth. In his opinion, there is no man who has not deserved hanging five or six times, and he claims no exception in his own behalf. “Five or six as ridiculous stories,” he says, “may he told of me as of any man living.” This very frankness has caused some to question his sincerity, but his dissection of his own inconsistent self is too consistent with flesh and blood to be anything but natural.
Bit by bit the reader of the Essays grows familiar with Montaigne; and he must have a dull imagination indeed who fails to conceive a distinct picture of the thick-set, square-built, clumsy little man, so undersized that he did not like walking, because the mud of the streets bespattered him to the middle, and the rude crowd jostled and elbowed him. He disliked Protestantism, but his mind was wholly averse to bigotry and persecution. Gibbon, indeed, reckons Montaigne and Henri IV as the only two men of liberality in the France of the sixteenth century. Nothing more distinguishes Montaigne than his deep sense of the uncertainty and provisional character of human knowledge; and Mr. Emerson has well chosen him for a type of the sceptic. Montaigne’s device—a pair of scales evenly balanced, with the motto, Quo scais je? (What do I know?)—perfectly symbolises the man.
The only book we have which we certainly know was handled by Shakespeare, is a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. It contains the poet’s autograph, and was purchased. by the British Museum for one hundred and twenty guineas. A second copy of the same translation in the Museum has Ben Jonson’s name on the fly-leaf.
I am going to do a series on the Ten Greatest Canadians of the Twentieth Century, in no particular order. I may cheat a bit, as you will see. Since today is the birthday of one of those worthies, let us begin with him.
For many excellent reasons, Canada does not have a President. Our head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, and in her absence, a Governor-General who opens Parliament, hands out awards, and carries on all the ceremonial duties, while mere Prime Ministers and politicians do the grubby business of actually running the country. By universal accord, the greatest of our Governors-General was Georges Vanier, a splendid figure of a man with a heroic mustache, a chest full of medals, and a long record of service to his nation as a soldier and a diplomat. His wife Pauline was beautiful, pious and serene; together they helped refugees and founded the Vanier Institute of the Family. But perhaps their greatest gift to the world was the birth of their son Jean.
Jean Vanier served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and was a career officer in peace time with the Royal Canadian Navy. He resigned his commission to become a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, publishing works on Aristotle. When he was 36 years old, a friend showed him the horrible living conditions endured by people with mental disabilities. The result of this visit was a life-long dedication to serving the helpless and oppressed. He began a small community of the disabled and their helpers called L’Arche or The Ark, in a village in France, which blossomed into a world-wide movement with 147 homes in 35 countries. Vanier died recently at age 90, still a resident of his ‘’Arche community in Picardy.
It is a safe bet that before too long Vanier will be canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church, a fate that probably awaits his parents as well.
Well, all the above was written in 2019. Since then Vanier has been credibly accused of a tawdry sort of sexual misconduct. Under the guise of spiritual direction, Vanier seems to have manipulated a number of women, including nuns, into a sexual relationship. He was posthumously stripped of honours and schools once named after him were renamed. It is a safe bet his canonization will not take place any time soon.
“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Future generations will have to weigh Vanier’s undoubted contributions against the harm he did to those 6 women.
Pretty much everyone has seen the picture of American general Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri signing the acceptance of the Japanese surrender which ended the Second World War in the Pacific. Less well-known is the fact that Canada also signed this document as one of the belligerents in the struggle against the Japanese empire.
Great Britain, in its own imperialistic way, assumed that it would sign on behalf of its Dominions but MacArthur chose to invite the Australians, who had played a significant part in battles against the Japanese, as well as Canada, New Zealand and two countries whose Asian colonies had been conquered, France and the Netherlands. The Australians were reportedly miffed at the Canadian invitation.
The Canadian signature was added by Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrove (pictured above) who accidentally signed on the wrong line, perhaps because he was blind in one eye from a wound suffered in World War I.
Cosgrove had been a war hero (DSO and the Croix de Guerre) and was supposedly the fellow on whose back John McRae wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields” in the trenches on the Western Front in 1917.
The 1984 movie Amadeus is a wonderful piece of cinema if you don’t care a fig for historical truth. It is sumptuously staged and brilliantly acted and, best of all, it is full of the wonderful music of Wolfgang Mozart, one of God’s kindest gifts to humanity. Unfortunately, its plot slanders the reputation of a very able and innovative composer and conductor, (and, apparently, a rather decent guy) Antonio Salieri (1750-1825).
Salieri was an Italian who spent most of his professional life serving the Austrian Habsburgs, especially the enlightened despot Joseph II, a noted musical aficionado. His operas were performed all over Europe; his influence on the genre was considerable. He was the imperial Kappelmeister and was the teacher of Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert, yet the fictional musings of Alexander Pushkin and Peter Shaffer had made his life a metaphor for jealousy and mediocrity. In fact, Salieri and Mozart had no poisonous relationship and, if anything, Salieri was a supporter of his younger colleague. For a revisionist look that seeks to restore his personal and musical reputation, read Alexander Ross’s “Antonio Salieri’s Revenge”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/antonio-salieris-revenge.
Oh, how true that is. I cannot watch historical dramas without getting upset at the anachronisms. I have no trouble with cheesy Hercules Unchained rubbish but something that purports to convey truth and does not, causes the veins in my temple to throb. Herewith the three worst “historical” films. Number Three on your program is Oliver Stone’s JFK. Stone took the paranoid fantasies of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and turned it into an attack on the military-industrial complex. The fact that Garrison’s theories were laughed out of court mattered naught to Stone. Number Two is The Burning Times by Canada’s National Film Board under the direction of Starhawk, a witch. It claims that there was a Female Holocaust of 9,000,000 dead in the early-modern witchcraft craze. This was happily used by university Women’s Studies departments for years.
Number One, the worst historical film ever made, is King Arthur directed by Antoine Fuqua.
The lies start with the voiceover introduction: “By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land. More peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field. And when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship, spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day.”
Rubbish in the first degree. By 300 the Roman empire was not expanding; it was barely holding on, rescued from collapse by soldier-emperor Diocletian who persecuted Christians intensely and who did not put Christian symbols on his soldiers’ shields as the opening scenes suggested.
“The powerful Sarmatians” were not all that powerful and were just about on their last legs as an independent people in the 300s AD; they certainly weren’t conquered by the Romans (they were absorbed by Slavs and other barbarian confederacies) or enlisted by the Romans as “knights”, an anachronistic term.
The film is set in Britain in the year 476 with Arthur (Clive Owen) leading a troop of Sarmatian cavalry in the Roman army. In fact, the last Roman military unit left the island in 410. And they ride with stirrups which were unknown at the time.
Arthur is a follower of Pelagius (a real historical character, a British heretic who proposed a theory of human free will at odds with the Christian doctrine of the need for divine grace). In the movie Pelagius’s notion of free will is meant to be some sort of democracy and he is murdered by the Church because of it. In fact Pelagius died c 420 unmolested by the Church, except in debate.
Pelagius’s murderer is the film’s villain, Bishop Germanius (clearly supposed to be Germanus of Auxerre, the opponent of Pelagius who died in 429 and who, of course, never laid a finger on the heretic much less killed him.) He reneges on the deal that would have allowed Arthur’s men to go home, forcing them to go on one last mission, to rescue a Roman official who lives north of Hadrian’s Wall and whose son might be the pope one day.
The Christian official whom the heroes are sent to save is, of course, a very bad man who tortures his slaves for asking for food. He tells them he speaks with the voice of God and that it is a sin to disobey him. The willingness of the film to tar the Church with any sort of evil reaches its low point when we see a monk wall himself up with pagans, eager to torture them into salvation and starve to death in the process. “It is God’s wish that these sinners be sacrificed. Only then can their souls be saved.”
All of this anti-Christian blather goes on before the battles with the invading Saxons who are shown to be racists as well as real mean guys (and invading north of the Wall instead of hundreds of miles south of it as in real life. There was nothing to steal up north.) Arthur teams up with British natives known as “Woads”, in real life the “Picts”. Woad is the plant that gives the blue dye the Picts adorned themselves with. Such an alliance is necessary because we learn that the Saxons have metal crossbows (not invented until 800 years later) but the Woads have trebuchets (likewise centuries out of place.) The most attractive of the Woads is Guinevere (Keira Knightley) who hurls her fragile frame clad in a well-tailored deer-skin bikini against the Saxons in a series of dazzling kung-fu moves unknown to history until the birth of Jet Li.
Sorry for the rant. It’s been 16 years since King Arthur and I’m still mad.
The London Daily Telegraph made the following report:
It was announced yesterday that, at 7.30 p.m., M. de Groof, the “Flying Man” would repeat at the Cremorne Gardens “his astounding performance of flying through the air a distance of 5,000 feet.” True to this announcement, the Flying Man did endeavour to repeat the exploit which he had accomplished in safety ten days before, and perished in the attempt.
M. de Groof was a Belgian, who had expended years in constructing for himself an apparatus with which he believed it possible to imitate the flight of a bird. The general outline of this apparatus was an immitation of a bat’s wings, the framework being made of cane, and the intervening membrane of stout waterproof silk. The wings were in all 37 feet long, with an average breadth of 4 feet, while the tail was 18 feet by 3. These wings were inserted into two hinged frames that were attached to a wooden stand upon which the aeronaut took his place. Here he had three levers which he worked by hand to give his machine propulsion or guidance as might be required; his theory being that having started from a given height, he could manage his descent so as to reach the earth by a sort of inclined swooping motion, without risk of concussion.
About a year ago M. de Groof made an attempt, of which our correspondent at the time telegraphed the particulars. to descend from a great neight on the Grande Place at Brussels. The effort was a failure, but l’Homme Volant as he was then called, escaped unhurt, though his network was afterwards torn in pieces by the crowd. On Monday, the 20th ultimo, however, M. de Groof repeated his experiment at Cremorne Gardens, with success. Mr. Baum, tho proprietor of the gardens, had, it seems, after making an engagement with him, felt some uneasiness as to the result, and at first refused to allow the trial to be made. The “Flying Man” protested the absolute feasibility of his scheme, and insisted on the contract being carried out; and this was done. The wings and stand were attached to a balloon guided by Mr. Simmons, who, after drifting over London towards Brandon, in Essex, released his companion at a considerable height—three or four hundred feet, it is said—and the flying apparatus was immediately set in motion. “For a time” it is stated, “it was a race between the aeronaut and the flyer, De Groof winning by two flelds’ lengths, and attaining the ground in perfect safety.”
How the accident occurred last night cannot be clearly ascertained. The apparatus, previous to the ascent, seemed in satisfactory order, and De Groof—though, according to custom, he took an affectionate farewell of his wife—appeared fully confident of making a successful ascent. About a quarter to 8 o’clock the balloon was cut loose, and rose slowly in the air, bearing with it the Flying Man and his gear. There was hardly a breath of air, a circumstance which might have been supposed to be favourable to the performance of an aeronautical feat of the kind. Be this as it may, however, when the balloon had attained a height of three or four hundred feet, the unfortunate performer seemed either to mistrust his own powers or the capability of his apparatus, for he was heard by the spectators below shouting to the man in the balloon to bring him nearer the earth. This request was complied with, and the balloon descended slowly towards Robert-street, which lies a quarter of a mile or so to the north of Cremorne Gardens. On approaching St. Luke’s Church, Mr. Simmons, the balloonist, was heard to say: “Yon must cut loose now, or you’ll come on the church roof.” The answer was, “Yes; let me drop into the churchyard,” and these were, no doubt, the last words De Groof uttered.
He cut the rope when about eighty feet from the ground, but, to the horror of the spectators, who must have numbered many thousand, the apparatus, instead of inflating with the pressure of the air, collapsed, and, turning round and round in its descent, fell with great violence in Robert-street, a yard or two from the kerbstone. Assistance to the unfortunate man was instantly forthcoming. Although still breathing, he was insensible; but the despatch with which he was extricated from the wreck of his apparatus and conveyed to Chelsea Infirmary proved in vain. He never recovered consciousness, and on his arrival at the hospital the surgeons pronounced him dead, Madame de Groof, who witnessed her husband’s fall, fainted at the sight, and a still more painful scene took place a short time later at the hospital, when she learned the whole sad truth.
The apparatus was carried off in shreds by the crowd before the police could secure it. From the hospital the body was removed to the dead-house, where it now awaits the inquest. It only remains to add that the balloon, on being freed from the weight of De Groof and his flying machine, soared away over the metropolis in a north-easterly direction; and, at dark, was seen at a great height above Victoria Park, where it was watched with much interest by large numbers of people, who were, of course, ignorant of the shocking tragedy in which it had played a part.
Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and. being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945) “On Stupidity” – Letters and Papers from Prison
