Christmas Every Day

1625 Accession of Charles I

There are good kings and bad kings. And then there are disastrous kings, ones who provoke discord in their own country, engender civil war, lose their heads, and bring down an entire monarchy with them. Such a one was Charles Stuart (1600-49), the first of that name to rule Scotland, Ireland, and England.

Charles was born a Scottish prince, a younger son with no great prospects, child of  James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. In 1603, the Queen of England, Elizabeth I, died without issue, and James succeeded her on the throne of that much richer country to the south. It was expected that his heir would be his oldest son, Henry (b. 1594) who was popular and trained for the job, but the young man died of typhoid in 1612, leaving shy, stammering Charles as the future ruler of three kingdoms.

Charles’s father was not the best man from whom to learn the arts of ruling. James constantly quarrelled with his political class, showed little interest in military affairs, and allowed policy to be guided by a number of homosexual lovers. From him, Charles seems to have imbibed a contempt for Parliament, and a stubborn streak that would prove fatal. Parliament, always fearful of a return of Catholic influence, demanded that the prince be given a safely Protestant bride but Charles, aided by the Duke of Buckingham, James’s paramour, unwisely courted the daughter of the King of Spain and received a humiliating rebuff. Stung by this personal insult, Charles demanded that his father declare war on Spain.

When James died in early 1625, the new king unwisely chose another Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France. It was the first of a series of mistakes that would lead Charles to the block, his queen and her sons to exile, and England to a republic.

It must be said that there are fans of Charles, including a loyal reader of this blog, who would remind us that Charles is viewed as a martyr and a saint by the Church of England. 

A story too sad not to be retold: 1997 Heaven’s Gate suicide cult discovered

One of the most persistent beliefs in history is the notion that our body is only the temporary form of our true self — the soul, or spirit, which lives on after the physical corpus dies. For many religions, the purpose of life is to escape one’s prison of flesh and bone and be reunited with the Universal One or be reanimated in a perfected body. The faithful of most of these religions are content to wait until one’s natural death for the parting of body and soul to take place, but there have been some sects who have encouraged suicide in order to hasten the process: thus the perfecti of medieval Catharism, or the techno-cultists of America’s Heaven’s Gate.

On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 members of the group were found by San Diego police in the mansion where they had lived and earned their livings as IT consultants. All had committed suicide; all were wearing new Nike runners with black shirts and sweat-pants; all had $5.75 in their pockets. All had taken phenobarbital medication mixed with apple sauce and washed down with vodka; all but two had plastic bags tied around their heads. Astonishingly, their suicides had taken place in waves, with three groups in turns dying over three days. The purpose of their deaths was to evacuate their bodies, freeing their spirits to be picked up by an alien spacecraft lurking behind the Hale-Boppe comet. They would then advance to a higher level of existence in bodies that were purer, sexless and vegetarian. All who remained behind on Earth were to die from an imminent planetary cleansing.

The chief loon behind this tragedy was Marshall Applewhite (1931-97), aka “Bo” or “Do”, former music teacher, wandering prophet, and voluntary eunuch. He had been able to recruit followers to his esoteric beliefs with promises of an end-times apocalypse that could be escaped only by those with the knowledge he imparted. His teachings were a mixture of Gnosticism, Biblical interpretation through a lens of UFOlogy, and sundry New Age touches. Like the medieval Cathars they shunned sex, with Applewhite and seven of his male disciples travelling to Mexico to be castrated.

The fate of their souls and the alien spacecraft are unknown; their bodies were cremated.

1695 An Interesting Story About Fairies

From John Aubrey’s Miscellanies comes this account.

March 25, 1695.

HONOURED SIR,
I RECEIVED yours dated May 24th, 1694, in which you desire me to send you some instances and examples of Transportation by an Invisible Power. The true cause of my delaying so long, to reply to that letter, was not want of kindness; but of fit materials for such a reply.

As soon as I read your letter of May 24, I called to mind, a story
which I heard long ago, concerning one of the Lord Duffus, (in the shire of Murray) his predecessors of whom it is reported, that upon a time, when he was walking abroad in the fields near to his own house, he was suddenly carried away, and found the next day at Paris in the French King’s cellar, with a silver cup in his hand; that being brought into the King’s presence and questioned by him, who he was? and how he came thither? he told his name, his country, and the place of his residence, and that on such a day of the month (which proved to be the day immediately preceding) being in the fields, he heard the noise of a whirl-wind, and of voices crying “Horse and Hattock”, (this is the word which the fairies are said to use when they remove from any place) whereupon he cried “Horse and Hattock” also, and was immediately caught up, and transported through the air, by the fairies to that place, where after he had drank heartily he fell asleep, and before he awoke, the rest of the company were gone, and had left him in posture wherein he was found. It is said, the King gave him the cup which was found in his hand, and dismissed him.

This story (if it could be sufficiently attested) would be a noble
instance for your purpose, for which cause I was at some pains to enquire into the truth of it, and found the means to get the present Lord Duffus’s opinion thereof; which shortly is, that there has been, and is such a tradition, but that he thinks it fabulous; this account of it, his Lordship had from his father, who told him that he had it from his father, the present Lord’s grandfather; there is yet an old silver cup in his Lordship’s possession still, which is called the Fairy Cup; but has nothing engraven upon it, except the arms of the family.

The Duffus family is an ancient one in Scotland. A 1641 decision of the local church court reveals that “James Duffus and George Duffus and Charles Stevinson convict in Break of ye Sabbath for playing at ye golff, efternoone, in time of Sermon, and yr for ar ordayned evrie ane of them to pay havff a merk, and mak yr repentance ye next Sabbath”.

1514 Birth of an assassin

The Medici family dominated the political life of Florence for centuries, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. At times they were beloved by Florentines and other occasions they were expelled for their misrule. The family produced some great rulers such as Cosimo, the dynasty’s founder, and Lorenzo the Magnificent as well as a host of popes; it also gave history notable losers such as Alessandro “il Moro” and his killer Lorenzino.

Lorenzino was a member of a lesser branch of the family and was raised outside of Florence in a Tuscan villa and Venice. As a teenager he was involved in a serious act of vandalism in Rome and his character was not improved when he moved to Florence and became a companion of Alessandro de Medici, the young Duke of the city. Both became known for riotous living and both came to be unpopular figures in the eyes of influential Florentines. At some point the two quarreled and Lorenzino decided to murder his cousin.

On the evening of Epiphany, 1537 Alessandro was lured to a palace apartment under the impression that Lorenzino had arranged a sexual encounter with his aunt Caterina Soderin “a young woman of marvelous beauty, no less chaste than beautiful”. Unarmed and unsuspecting, Alessandro was knifed to death by Lorenzino and an accomplice, despite nearly biting off one of his assailant’s fingers. Lorenzino fled and wrote a book which declared that he had murdered the duke in order to restore republican government to Florence.

Some hailed him as a virtuous tyrannicide and compared him to Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. Others were bent on revenge, forcing Lorenzino to spend the rest of his life in exile looking over his shoulder, as a contemporary explained, “dying neither night or day, he died a thousand times both night and day, not of a dagger or poison, but of remorse and shame.” In February 1548 he was killed by two thugs commissioned by no less a figure than Emperor Charles V, whose daughter was the widow of Alessandro.