Christmas Every Day

1627 Birth of the “Eagle of Meaux”

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) has been called the greatest pulpit orator ever; his name is a byword for elegance of speech. As a preacher and Catholic bishop he engaged in the great religious controversies of his time, taking on Protestants, Quietists, ultramontanists and secularists; as a tutor to the heir to the throne he failed miserably.

Bossuet was born to a prosperous provincial family of lawyers with powerful connections. He was destined by his family for the Church and in the amiable corruption of the age became tonsured at age 10 and a canon of the cathedral of Metz at 13. Though he continued to take advantage of sins against canon law such as absenteeism, Bossuet took his religious commitment seriously; he studied for the priesthood under St Frances de Sales and received his Doctor of Divinity.

Even in his teens Bossuet had a reputation as a brilliant public speaker and he eventually attracted the attention of the court of Louis XIV. He preached before royalty and was rewarded with a bishopric and the post of tutor to Louis’ oldest son, the Grand Dauphin. His efforts in this regard were misplaced and wasted. To school the lumpish lad he wrote three grand tomes, a treatise on knowing God and oneself, a history of the world, and a creaky master-piece entitled  Politique Tirée des Propres Paroles de L’Ecriture Sainte. [This is the book I translated as Political Theory Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture for part of my Master’s thesis.] The latter was the last bold attempt at defending absolute monarchy, no surprise from a courtier of the Sun King, but it fell on deaf ears — not only those of the Dauphin but the larger world about to experience the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. It may be said that Bossuet was born a generation too late but that his golden expressions are still valued by lovers of the French language.

In the 19th century, Sudanese territory was claimed by Egypt, which ran a corrupt and oppressive rule over the territory. In 1881 a devout Muslim religious scholar named Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi, the legendary prophesied figure that would appear at the end of time and who would herald the arrival of Isa (Jesus) and the Final Judgment. He was able to rally the disaffected tribes of the Sudan against the Egyptians, conquering much of the upper Nile valley. Like ISIS and their caliphate, the Mahdi attempted to reintroduce the pure, harsh Islam of the 7th century.

After several military attempts to defeat the Mahdi, the British (who now controlled Egypt) decided to pull out of the Sudan and sent the charismatic, popular hero General Charles Gordon to arrange the evacuation. Gordon, instead, chose to stay and fight. He and his troops were massacred in the capital Khartoum in 1884, causing an enormous scandal back in Britain. Though the Mahdi soon died, his successor, known as the Khalifa, built a powerful Mahdist state that attempted to spread its variety of Islam by the sword.

In 1898 the British decided to put an end to this threat to European imperialism in Africa, sending an army up the Nile, under General Herbert Kitchener. The Mahdist forces greatly outnumbered Kitchener’s troops but the British had machine guns and artillery. Near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles at Omdurman, the wild charges of the Mahdists (called “dervishes” or “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” by the British) were mowed down by disciplined fire of the more modern army.

Four Victorian Crosses were awarded for that day’s action including one to a Canadian, Captain Raymond de Montmorency of the 21st Lancers (whose charge is depicted here.)

The citation for the medal reads: “At the Battle of Khartum on the 2nd September 1898, Lieutenant de Montmorency, after the charge of the 21st Lancers, returned to assist Second Lieutenant R. G. Grenfell, who was lying surrounded by a large body of Dervishes. Lieutenant de Montmorency drove the Dervishes off, and, finding Lieutenant Grenfell dead, put the body on his horse which then broke away. Captain Kenna and Corporal Swarbrick then came to his assistance, and enabled him to rejoin the Regiment, which had begun to open a heavy fire on the enemy.”

De Montmorency was born in Quebec in 1867, the son of a British general, and he joined the British Army at the age of 20. After Sudan, de Montmorency was assigned to South Africa where he fought in the Boer War, dying at the Battle of Stormberg in 1900.

The classic 1939 movie “The Four Feathers” recreates the Battle of Omdurman with a cast of tens of thousands. It’s quite impressive. Do not, on any account, watch the putrid remake of 2003.

1217 Death of Kaupo the Accursed

One of the joys of being a medieval historian is understanding the nicknames of famous leaders of the day. A single battle in 1066, for example, transformed William “the Bastard” into William “the Conqueror” while a lifetime of feckless behaviour earned Ethelred the label of “the Unready”. Wonderful stories lie behind the origins of sobriquets like “Bushy-Brow”, “the Impotent”, “the Boneless”, “Hare-Foot”, “the Twister”, and “Blood-Axe”. But what about Kaupo of Livonia who ended up being known as “the Accursed”?

The last parts of Europe to be Christianized lay at the eastern end of the Baltic, between the Orthodox lands of Russia and Catholic Germany and Poland, inhabited by tribes of Finns, Livonians, Latvians, etc. Attempts to peacefully evangelize them were met with resistance, prompting a series of Northern Crusades by military orders such as the Teutonic Knights or Knights of the Sword who combined missionary work with brutal conquest.

As these German-speaking orders pressed eastward, one of the first Livonians to accept baptism was Kaupo of Turaida, a local chieftain who so impressed the Bishop of Riga that he took him to Rome where he was presented to the pope. On his return to his native land, however, Kaupo was rejected for his new religion and alliances with foreigners. He had to reconquer his own castle and died fighting along side crusaders against pagan Estonians; for his divided loyalties he was labelled a traitor and “the Accursed”. It was not until the early 1300s that the territory was nominally Christianized.

I pause here to draw your attention to two Canadians of whom you have never heard. They were not particularly great, and they are not men of the 20^thcentury, so they will not pop up on my list – but their appearances in history are remarkable.

If one were to ask what were the most interesting battles of the 19^thcentury, the answer would certainly include Waterloo in 1815, where Wellington defeated Napoleon, or Sedan in 1870 where the Prussians smashed the French under Napoleon III. Both battles ended French empires. But for sheer excitement, you can’t beat the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava during the Crimean War in 1854 or the Battle of Omdurman, where the jihadists of Sudan faced the British in 1898. Today, I’ll tell you about Balaclava.

For the first time in over 600 years, the British and French armies were allies, not enemies. Their governments decided to prop up the shaky Ottoman Empire of the Turks and protect it from Russian ambitions to drive Turkey out of Europe, retake Constantinople and have an outlet to the Mediterranean. (The world would have been a better place if they had been allowed to do so, but that’s a topic for a rant on another day.) This explains what badly-equipped and atrociously-led French and British armies were doing on the Crimean peninsula, besieging Sevastopol in 1854.

On October 25, a misunderstood communication between the commander, Lord Raglan, and his light cavalry forces resulted in disaster and glory. Raglan meant to send his troops to recapture some British artillery that had been hauled away by the Russians but his messenger, Captain Nolan screwed up, and pointed the cavalry, led by the Earl of Cardigan, toward a heavily defended valley lined with Russian artillery. The exchange went like this:

“Attack, sir!”

“Attack what? What guns, sir?”

“There, my Lord, is your enemy!” said Nolan indignantly, vaguely waving his arm eastwards. “There are your guns!

And so, Cardigan, knowing full well that this was madness, ordered his 670 horsemen up the valley to attack 20 battalions of dug-in infantry and 50 artillery pieces. This charge was suicidal but it was carried out successfully. The men and horses were shredded by Russian guns for over a mile before they reached the end of the valley where they destroyed some Russian positions and rode back out, under heavy fire again from three sides.

The cost was 118 men killed, 127 wounded, and about 60 taken prisoner, with 335 horses destroyed. The various generals all blamed each other and Captain Nolan, but Alfred Tennyson immortalized the engagement in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.

So why am I telling you all this? Because, to my astonishment, I learned that a Canadian had taken part in the charge and, better yet, had been awarded a Victoria Cross. More about him, Alexander Roberts Dunn and his mysterious grave, tomorrow.

Next up on our whirlwind tour of the Top 10 Canadians of the 20^thCentury is Reginald Fessenden, born in Quebec in 1866, the son of an Anglican minister. He was a bright kid but bounced from one educational facility to another but never seeming to get a degree. Despite knowing nothing about electricity, he got a job as a lab assistant for one of Thomas Edison’s departments. Using that experience he got a job in the electrical engineering department of what became the University of Pittsburgh where he began to experiment with the newly discovered “wireless telegraphy”.

Fessenden pioneered many electronic principles and devices that made signals more powerful and capable of sending voice messages, instead of just Morse code. The result of this was the invention of AM radio. Here is how the Encyclopedia Britannica explains his idea:

He developed the idea of superimposing an electric signal, oscillating at the frequencies of sound waves, upon a radio wave of constant frequency, so as to modulate the amplitude of the radio wave into the shape of the sound wave. (This is the principle of amplitude modulation, or AM.) The receiver of this combined wave would separate the modulating signal from the carrier wave and reproduce the sound for the listener.

Using this notion, he was responsible for the world’s first radio program. Fessenden had a contract to provide ships of the United Fruit Company with wireless receivers and on Christmas Eve 1906, he beamed these vessels a broadcast of recorded and live music (played by Fessenden) and a passage from the Gospel of Luke. 

Despite this triumph by one of its native sons, the Canadian government gave the Italian inventor Marconi exclusive rights to build wireless stations in Canada

After his work with radio, which produced enormous legal headaches for years, he went on to engineer the Niagara Falls power plant, and invent sonar, microfilm, tracer bullets, seismological techniques, a turboelectric drive for battleships, and television apparatus. After many years of litigation and struggle over patents he became wealthy when his intellectual property was finally recognized; he retired to Bermuda where he died in 1932.

Next to appear on the list of the Ten Greatest Canadians of the 20th Century is one of those dead, white, heterosexual males who are so harmful to society: Frederick Banting (1891-1941), the co-inventor of insulin and the youngest-ever Nobel laureate in Medicine.

Banting was to a farm family born in Alliston, Ontario and as a young man distinguished himself by flunking his first year of university in an Arts program at the University of Toronto. Nonetheless, Banting was admitted to Medicine in the following year, proving conclusively that those who fail in the Humanities may, nonetheless, go on to lead productive lives. The First World War broke out during his studies; Banting joined the Army which fast-tracked his medical training. He was sent overseas as a military doctor, was wounded in battle, and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

After the war, Banting’s medical career did not flourish but he was a respected lecturer on physiology. In 1920 he began to research diabetes and proposed a particular method by which insulin could be isolated from the pancreas and used to treat the disease. By 1922 he was able to save the lives of patients who would otherwise have died and the next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery, along with the supervisor of the laboratory, J.J.R. Macleod who lent Banting his student Charles Best and the help of a biochemist, James Collip. Banting shared his prize money with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip.

In 1934, Banting was knighted by King George V. He was involved in research for the Royal Canadian Air Force when World War II erupted. He was killed in 1941 in a plane crash while on the way to England to test a flying suit that would prevent pilots from blacking out.

Today is the 101^stanniversary of the first tank-on-tank battle in history.

In the spring of 1918, the Imperial German Army mounted a massive attack on Allied lines in northern France and managed a real breakthrough – the first in years of static trench warfare on the Western Front. They moved 15 divisions to take the strategic town of Villers-Bretonneux which was defended by British, Australian and Canadian troops. After capturing their objective they moved forward and were met by three British Mark IV tanks – one of them “male” (a term used to describe a tank armed with machine guns and a cannon on each side), and two “female” machines (equipped with machine guns to be used against infantry). These tanks normally required a crew of 8 but the male had lost half its men to a poison gas attack.

The Germans countered with a section of three very large A7V monsters (shown below) with crews of 18 men. Two of the British females were knocked out but the male scored hits on the German tanks, eliminating one and driving the others off. At that point seven smaller British Whippet tanks arrived and tore into the advancing German infantry, halting their attack. 

Germany lagged far behind in tank technology in World War I and scarcely produced any armoured vehicles. But their post-war General Staff learned their lesson, studied Allied textbooks and tactics, and built a terrifying Blitzkrieg array ready when World War II began in 1939.

From The Catholic Encyclopedia, the magisterial 1912 edition, comes this account of St Patrick’s final days and the concessions he won from God for the people of Ireland. Some pretty bold claims here.

The saint, however, would not, as yet, descend from the mountain. He had vanquished the demons, but he would now wrestle with God Himself, like Jacob of old, to secure the spiritual interests of his people. The angel had announced to him that, to reward his fidelity in prayer and penance, as many of his people would be gathered into heaven as would cover the land and sea as far as his vision could reach. Far more ample, however, were the aspirations of the saint, and he resolved to persevere in fasting and prayer until the fullest measure of his petition was granted. Again and again the angel came to comfort him, announcing new concessions; but all these would not suffice. He would not relinquish his post on the mountain, or relax his penance, until all were granted. At length the message came that his prayers were heard:

• many souls would be free from the pains of purgatory through his intercession; 
• whoever in the spirit of penance would recite his hymn before death would attain the heavenly reward; 
• barbarian hordes would never obtain sway in his Church; 
• seven years before the Judgement Day, the sea would spread over Ireland to save its people from the temptations and terrors of the Antichrist; and 
• greatest blessing of all, Patrick himself should be deputed to judge the whole Irish race on the last day.

Such were the extraordinary favors which St. Patrick, with his wrestling with the Most High, his unceasing prayers, his unconquerable love of heavenly things, and his unremitting penitential deeds, obtained for the people whom he evangelized.

At Saul (Sabhall), St. Patrick received the summons to his reward on 17 March, 493. St. Tassach administered the last sacraments to him. His remains were wrapped in the shroud woven by St. Brigid’s own hands. The bishops and clergy and faithful people from all parts crowded around his remains to pay due honour to the Father of their Faith. Some of the ancient Lives record that for several days the light of heaven shone around his bier. His remains were interred at the chieftan’s Dun or Fort two miles from Saul, where in after times arose the cathedral of Down.

Chamber’s Book of Days, a 19th-century source tells us about these resisters of technology:

March 11^th, 1811, is a black-letter day in the annals of Nottinghamshire. It witnessed the commencement of a series of riots which, extending over a period of five years, have, perhaps, no parallel in the history of a civilized country for the skill and secrecy with which they were managed, and the amount of wanton mischief they inflicted. The hosiery trade, which employed a large part of the population, had been for some time previously in a very depressed state. This naturally brought with it a reduction in the price of labour.

During the month of February 1811, numerous bands of distressed framework-knitters were employed to sweep the streets for a paltry sum, to keep the men employed, and to prevent mischief. But by the 11^th of March their patience was exhausted: and flocking to the market-place from town and country, they resolved to take vengeance on those employers who had reduced their wages. The timely appearance of the military prevented any violence in the town, but at night no fewer than sixty-three frames were broken at Arnold, a village four miles north of Nottingham. During the succeeding three weeks 200 other stocking frames were smashed by midnight bands of distressed and deluded workmen, who were so bound together by illegal oaths, and so completely disguised, that very few of them could be brought to justice. These depredators assumed the name of Luddites; said to have been derived from a youth named Ludlam, who, when his father, a framework-knitter in Leicestershire, ordered him to ‘square his needles,’ took his hammer and beat them into a heap.

Their plan of operation was to assemble in parties of from six to sixty, as circumstances required, under a leader styled General or Ned Ladd, all disguised, and armed, some with swords, pistols, or firelocks, others with hammers and axes. They then proceeded to the scene of destruction. Those with swords and firearms were placed as a guard outside, while the others broke into the house and demolished the frames, after which they reassembled at a short distance. The leader then called over his men, who answered not to names, but to certain numbers: if all were there, and their work for the night finished, a pistol was fired, and they then departed to their homes, removing the black handkerchiefs which had covered their faces. In consequence of the continuance of these daring outrages, a large military force was brought into the neighbourhood, and two of the London police magistrates, with several other officers, came down to Nottingham, to assist the civil power in attempting to discover the ringleaders: a secret committee was also formed, and supplied with a large sum of money for the purpose of obtaining private information; but in spite of this vigilance, and in contempt of a Royal Proclamation, the offenders continued their devastations with redoubled violence, as the following instances will shew.

On Sunday night, November 10th, a party of Luddites proceeded to the village of Bulwell, to destroy the frames of Mr. Rollingworth, who, in anticipation of their visit, had procured the assistance of three or four friends, who with firearms resolved to protect the property. Many shots were fired, and one of the assailants, John Woolley, of Arnold, was mortally wounded, which so enraged the mob that they soon forced an entrance: the little garrison fled, and the rioters not only destroyed the frames, but every article of furniture in the house. On the succeeding day they seized and broke a waggonload of frames near Arnold: and on the Wednesday following proceeded to Sutton-in-Ashfield, where they destroyed thirty-seven frames: after which they were dispersed by the military, who took a number of prisoners, four of whom were fully committed for trial.

During the following week only one frame was destroyed, but several slacks were burned, most probably, as was supposed, by the Luddites, in revenge against the owners, who, as members of the yeoman cavalry, were active in suppressing the riots. On Sunday night, the 24^th of November, thirty-four frames were demolished at Basford, and eleven more the following day. On December the 6th, the magistrates published an edict, which ordered all persons in the disturbed districts to remain in their houses after ten o’clock at night, and all public-houses to be closed at the same hour. Notwithstanding this proclamation, and a great civil and military force, thirty-six frames were broken in the villages around Nottingham within the six following days. A Royal Proclamation was then issued, offering £50 reward for the apprehension of any of the of-fenders: but this only excited the men to further deeds of daring.

They now began to plunder the farmhouses both of money and provisions, declaring that they ‘would not starve whilst there was plenty in the land.’ In the month of January 1812, the frame-breaking continued with unabated violence. On the 30th of this month, in the three parishes of Nottingham, no fewer than 4,348 families, numbering 15,350 individuals, or nearly half the population, were relieved out of the poor rates. A large subscription was now raised to offer more liberal rewards against the perpetrators of these daring outrages: and at the March assize seven of them were sentenced to transportation. In this month, also, an Act of Parliament was passed, making it death to break a stocking or a lace frame.

In April, a Mr. Trentham, a considerable manufacturer, was shot by two ruffians while standing at his own door. Happily the wound did not prove mortal: but the offenders were never brought to justice, though a reward of £600 was offered for their apprehension. This evil and destructive spirit continued to manifest itself from time to time till October 1816, when it finally ceased. Upwards of a thousand stocking frames and a number of lace machines were destroyed by it in the county of Nottingham alone, and at times it spread into the neighbouring counties of Leicester, Derby, and York, and even as far as Lancaster. Its votaries discovered at last that they were injuring themselves as much or more than their employers, as the mischief they perpetrated had to be made good out of the county rate.

She was like my ex-girlfriend Ashley, who’d stolen my car, broken my heart, murdered my father, robbed a bank, and set off a pipe bomb in Central Park – tall.

As the first shovelful of earth fell on her father’s coffin, Emily kneeled at the gravesite sobbing, overwrought by the sudden realization that, not only had she lost her only living relative, but she had somehow forgotten to set her DVR to record this week’s episode of “House of Cards,” an episode she had particularly wanted to see because of a rumored and breathlessly anticipated guest appearance by a nephew of Don Ho.

It was a dark and stormy night, and that translated into unchecked pandemonium among Los Angeles residents who hadn’t worn anything but open-toed shoes for five years, but tourist Alwyn Brewster was thankful for the scant traffic on Sunset Boulevard as he desperately accelerated his rental car through the tony neighborhoods, too preoccupied with the raging rivers of high-end, plastic patio-ware, which were making a break for the ocean, to notice a black Land Rover with diplomatic plates hot on his trail.