The Ultimate Social Climber?

From the portrait painted by Madame Lebrun, Gabrielle de Polignac gazes out at the world with bambi-eyed complacency. She looks so comfortable in her disarmingly simple white linen gown, there is a little poesy of flowers in her hand and on her head; she wears a wide-rimmed straw hat, like any country housewife. The portrait gives the impression that Lebrun managed to capture the beautiful duchess unexpectedly, on a lazy summer afternoon in the gardens. It has the feel of a photograph, snapped suddenly, capturing and preserving a fleeting moment like a fly caught forever in amber. It all looks so effortless - the governing maxim of Gabrielle de Polignac's social existence.

But, of course, it wasn't effortless. Portrait painting was a lengthy and time-consuming business. Artist and subject must have spent hours negotiating one another's schedule - finding the right outfit, the right style, the right look, the right time of day, the right light and, for Lebrun, the right price. Gabrielle must have known that she was taking a risk by appearing in such a revealing, faux-peasant ensemble. She knew that the more rigidly pious and conservative members of the French court, not to mention the woman-loathing, sexuality-fearing neo-puritans of the French revolutionary emergent "Left", were going to criticise her for appearing in what they saw as such a fundamentally indecent gown. Duchesses were not supposed to be painted looking like shepherdesses - but Gabrielle was indifferent to the criticism of those outside her charmed palace-dwelling clique. Her one nod to conventional portrait etiquette was that she appeared wearing a wig - had she appeared showing her own gorgeous brunette tresses au naturelle, it's likely that her (many) opponents would have had a collective aneurysm. 

So there she stands - two hundred years later - fresh-faced, pretty, elegant, simple. Lebrun, apparently, for what it's worth, didn't like the portrait very much and felt that she had failed to capture the one quality everyone could agree upon about Gabrielle - her beauty.

In his account of the French Revolution, the historian Simon Schama describes this portrait of Marie-Antoinette's favourite friend in her diaphanous shift as the painting of a woman who was "by any standards, strikingly comely ... looking like some freshly harvested and luscious fruit." Perhaps Gabrielle's most unusual feature were her lilac-coloured eyes, but her alabaster skin, youthfulness, pearly straight white teeth and brunette hair also combined to make her a devastatingly beautiful young woman. It was the first thing anyone commented on when describing her and the only thing they all seemed to agree upon. The Duc de Lévis, who didn't particularly like her, said she looked like a Raphaelite Madonna; Marie-Antoinette's chief perfume maker, Fargeon, choked out that Gabrielle's ravishing good looks masked her hateful personality; the first adjective used to describe Gabrielle by another of Marie-Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting was "beautiful", another said "lovely". When Gabrielle lay dying, her own daughter was at pains to stress that her mother's face had remained "beautiful" up to the very moment her life ended. Beauty and the strange affect it has on other people flowed through Gabrielle de Polignac's life, like a silent stream that slowly shaped the course of her destiny. De  Lévis rather nastily remarked that her beauty had ruined her; she had come to rely solely on it and she therefore had no other personality, no other interests, beyond simply being beautiful. Many would have agreed. The fact that her own child seemed preoccupied with stressing their mother's beauty, even in extremis, suggests how frighteningly inextricable it had become to how people, even her close loved ones, perceived her. How she would have coped without her looks, we shall never know. She died before they had begun to fade.

Gabrielle de Polignac was born Gabrielle de Polastron, the daughter of an impoverished family of the French aristocracy. She was married-off, whilst still a teenager, to Jules de Polignac, the son and heir of an equally well-bred and equally down-on-their-luck noble clan. It was a conventionally satisfactory aristocratic marriage - Jules and Gabrielle did not make each other miserable, but nor is there any sign of great love between them. They had four children together - their daughter, Aglaé, and three boys, Armand, Jules and Camille-Henri. Gabrielle's pushy sister-in-law, Diane, was a courtier at Versailles and it was through her that the couple were invited to a new year's party at the palace in the first year of Louis XVI's reign. It was there that Gabrielle was introduced to the new Queen of France, Louis's twenty year-old Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette. The two women struck up an instant rapport and Marie-Antoinette was fascinated by Gabrielle's unshakable self-confidence, her poise, her charisma and, almost certainly, her other-worldly beauty. Years later, it would be suggested that Marie-Antoinette had a lesbian or bisexual crush on Gabrielle; a version of their relationship that was recently revived in the new French movie Farewell, My Queen where Diane Kruger plays Marie-Antoinette and Virginie Ledoyen plays Gabrielle (below.)

There is nothing to suggest that Gabrielle's relationship with the Queen was a sexual one, or even romantic in the way that we would now understand it. It is by no means impossible, of course, for otherwise-heterosexual people to develop intense 'crushes' on a particularly interesting or attractive individual of the same sex; or for otherwise-homosexual people to do so vice-versa with the opposite sex. Marie-Antoinette's most recent biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, concludes that, in the early years of their friendship, this is the best way to describe Marie-Antoinette's devotion to Gabrielle. She writes, "None [of their behaviour] corresponded to an active lesbian relationship, if the test of that is physical consummation. But it is plausible to believe that Marie Antoinette was in some romantic sense in love with [Gabrielle] de Polignac (or, in girlish language, had a crush on her), at least in the early years of their relationship." For those familiar with the world of Brideshead Revisited, there was a relationship between the Queen and the Duchess which was not so very different to the one between Charles and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh's novel. Intense, passionate, almost certainly platonic in the physical sense, but romantic in the emotional sense. To extend the metaphor even further, in Brideshead Revisited Sebastian was the desperately lonely son of an absent marquess and Charles was a middle-class social climber dazzled by Sebastian's wealth and ineffable charm; Marie-Antoinette was the desperately lonely wife of a foreign king, crushed and depressed by the stultifying conservative court etiquette at Versailles, homesick for her sisters and prone to hysterical bouts of crying, shortness of breath and general unhappiness. Gabrielle de Polignac was the impoverished wife of an impoverished aristocrat, who was smart enough to know that friendship with the young queen could  lead directly to the golden fountain of royal favour - i.e. money.

From the moment they met, Gabrielle and Marie-Antoinette were inseparable. Gabrielle was cool, chic and glamorous; unlike everyone else at Versailles, she seemed indifferent to things like money, position, etiquette and power. In reality, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Gabrielle de Polignac was anything but indifferent to any of those things. Gabrielle rose quickly in the Queen's favour and in the King's, who, like his wife, found her to be a breath of proverbial fresh air. (There is no truth in the rather ridiculous theory recently put forward that the devoutly Catholic King Louis was sexually interested in Gabrielle himself; Louis XVI had a famously low sex drive and an extremely conservative Christian faith.) Gabrielle became an integral part of the royal couple's lives and, with her, came her family. Gabrielle managed to get them all jobs, pensions, generous salaries, good marriages and positions at court. She became the metaphorical centre of a rather fast, hard-partying clique of young courtiers, socialites and aristocrats who helped alleviate Marie-Antoinette's crushing sense of boredom. As Antonia Fraser writes, Gabrielle helped banish the ennui - "People enjoyed themselves in her company; her manner was gently pleasing and she had a delightful laugh." But, "For one seemingly lacking in avidity, she would amass an amazing amount of positions and rewards for herself, her large family [and] her connections".

One historian, Vincent Cronin, who wrote a dual biography of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, has admittedly sprung to Gabrielle's defence, arguing that it was only natural that the Queen should provide jobs and funds for a down-on-her-luck friend. Furthermore, given that Gabrielle was now expected to host various entertainments and parties because she was living at Versailles, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were "duty-bound" to help her afford it. 

There is some truth in Mr. Cronin's arguments, but the sheer amount of money that poured into Gabrielle's pretty little hands in the 1770s and 1780s went far, far beyond what was either prudent or necessary. Another one of Marie-Antoinette's biographers, Stefan Zweig, was infinitely more critical of "la belle Gabrielle," fulminating in his 1933 biography, "Not even Madame de Maintenon, not even the Pompadour, cost as much as this favourite, this angel with downcast eyes, this modest and gentle Polignac." That, too, is perhaps an exaggeration. Gabrielle de Polignac was no more responsible for damaging the French economy than Marie-Antoinette was. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of money being paid to the Polignacs and their dependents was a drop in the metaphorical ocean compared to the ludicrous sums being spent on frequent (and inevitably failing) recession-busting initiatives, in funding the American revolutionaries' fight against Great Britain or on trying to fix France's federalism-run-amok, creaking, out-of-date taxation system. But you can't get mad at federalism and you can't get mad at long-term socioeconomic trends, either. You can, however, look at the violet-eyed duchess and her Versailles crew and apportion all blame to them. She's visible and she's memorable. Gabrielle de Polignac, to put it mildly, was therefore loathed within a few years of joining Marie-Antoinette's circle.

Within the palace, the reasons for her unpopularity sprang mainly from jealousy. With Gabrielle monopolising Marie-Antoinette's time and affection, no-one else could climb the social ladder and become the Queen's new favourite. Many a failed socialite would utter the cry of the insidious and vile Madame de la Motte, who complained in her memoirs, "To be sure, one could hope for presentation to the Queen only through the Polignac clique, but the Duchess, jealous and fearful of losing the royal favour she monopolised, disdainfully repulsed any outsider who sought so much as a smile or a glance from the Queen... I was outraged by the attitude of this haughty and imperious woman. Well could I remember the Polignacs in Paris when they were impoverished nonentities". Gabrielle therefore became a useful scapegoat for any aristocrat who wanted to say they didn't enjoy the Queen's favour because the Duchess controlled all access to her; not because they themselves were too boring, annoying or unpleasant to actually win Marie-Antoinette's much-coveted friendship. 

Gabrielle also managed to tick people off with her (rare) displays of political sympathies - she was almost alone at Versailles in being pro-British and anti-American and she was rather too fond of drawing-up lists of people like the Duc de Brissac or Baron de Breteuil who had annoyed her. People on that list soon found their social lives at the palace being severely restricted and, in doing so, their opportunities for political advancement correspondingly dwindled. One palace servant likened Gabrielle to a steel dagger in a silken glove; another noted that the sweeter her tone got, the meaner her sentiment was likely to become.

Outside the palace, Gabrielle took the place of the royal mistress in public opinion. The French had a tradition of blaming all the mistakes of their government on the King's mistresses, rather than on the kings themselves. Even today, we have an ugly tendency to get angry when a woman, no matter how capable, seems too close to a powerful man - as poor Hillary Clinton found to her cost during her husband's presidency. However, both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were too clean-living to provide the country with paramours to blame. In Marie-Antoinette's case, anti-monarchists responded by simply making up hundreds of accused lovers - including animals, children and transvestites. They also, increasingly, insisted that she was having affairs with Gabrielle de Polignac and another close friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. Marie-Antoinette, with rather touching innocence, wrote to her mother that she was mainly being criticised in the gutter press for having a taste for lovers and a taste for women. Which rather suggests to me that the sheltered young royal wasn't aware that she was actually being accused of combining the two categories.

As they grew-up, Gabrielle and her queen remained close, but the girlish, co-dependent infatuation of the early days was long gone. They did, occasionally, quarrel. Marie-Antoinette loathed the Comte de Vaudreuil, a pushy military man whom Gabrielle was terribly fond of and who many believed she was having an affair with. The possibility that Gabrielle did have an affair with Vaudreuil cannot be disproved, nor should it be too easily dismissed; although, for what it's worth, my money is that they probably were not lovers. Marie-Antoinette also began to resent Gabrielle's numerous, parasitical relatives and their constant demands for more money and more favour, particularly at a time when the Queen herself was making drastic economies within the royal household. Sensing that time apart might do them good, Gabrielle went on a visit to England, where she stayed at Chatsworth with another close friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom she had first met at a Belgian spa a few years earlier. By the time she returned, French politics was teetering on the brink of its most epic crisis. Gabrielle hurled herself into supporting the agenda of what we would now recognise as the far-right. The diplomat, Marc de Bombelles, noted that he found her "working hard" with the King's younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, to have the liberal chief minister, Jacques Necker, dismissed from office.

Gabrielle de Polignac died in Austria on 9th December 1793, less than two months after the guillotine claimed the life of Marie-Antoinette. The cause of her death has variably been suggested as heartbreak, cancer or tuberculosis. In the two centuries since her death, historians have generally dealt harshly with her. At a time when many felt the French monarchy was in urgent need of reform, Gabrielle had actively supported the harshest possible measures against reformers and revolutionaries. In an age of great philosophers and the emergence of new political ideologies, the pretty duchess had laughed at intellectuals, mocked politicians and excluded anything too serious or too unpleasant from conversation at Versailles. She came to symbolise the corruption of the ancien regime - a government for blue-bloods, by blue-bloods. She was the last of the royal favourites. As more and more evidence was uncovered that Marie-Antoinette was nothing like the money-burning bimbo of popular legend, it was still possible to hurl all the blame onto Gabrielle de Polignac. Gorgeous, self-centred and wilfully isolated, Gabrielle became the historical poster girl for what had been wrong with a gorgeous, isolated, out-of-touch monarchy. She has, admittedly, had her defenders, too. Apart from Vincent Cronin, there have also been passionate rebuttals of her critics  - beginning, understandably, with her friends and family in the early nineteenth century. Recently, a "trad" Catholic royalist got rather carried away, I'm afraid, and compared her to Saint Nathaniel, which rather seems to be overegging the proverbial pudding.

Gabrielle de Polignac was not a "bad" woman - either by the standards of her own day or, really, by ours. She was a conventionally observant Roman Catholic, she was not promiscuous and she conformed to the general political beliefs of her religion and her class. She was not murderous, nor was she an ideologue. Whilst she was certainly selfish, vain and capable of petty nastiness, she was also gracious, elegant and had moments of great tenderness, as shown by her ability to soothe Marie-Antoinette's intermittent bouts of depression. But apart from the extraordinary times in which she lived and the extraordinary queen whose friendship she won, there is nothing too intrinsically fascinating about Gabrielle de Polignac - beyond two things. The first, as has been mentioned, is her great beauty. Beauty is, in itself, a fascinating topic. Good looks can both improve and bedevil the life of their holder. Beauty, which is good looks magnified, can also cut both ways like a double-handed sword. In Gabrielle's case, it propelled her into the spotlight, but it also led to people instinctively disliking her. Then and now, people don't like someone to "have it all". To be that beautiful, that confident and to have acquired the eighteenth century holy grail of royal patronage was quite simply too much for most of Gabrielle's contemporaries to stomach. 

The second point of interest is her astonishing success. It might seem strange to say that. After all, what did Gabrielle de Polignac really contribute to the world? She had no discernible talents and she produced nothing that impacted on French or European culture; even her letters are few and far between. By our standards, she did nothing except happen to be very rich and very pretty. Furthermore, she ended her life as a refugee from the bloody revolution that had destroyed the world she had grown-up in. But, by the standards of her own era, I do believe firmly that Gabrielle de Polignac not only succeeded but did so spectacularly. To an eighteenth century aristocrat, there were fewer obligations higher than family. Using nothing but her charm and self-belief, Gabrielle de Polignac dragged two families - her own and her husband's - from the genteel poverty that they had languished in for nearly a century. Regardless of the cost to her own personal reputation, she took the Polignac family and skyrocketed them into the upper echelons of the French nobility - a position that they hold to this day. Gabrielle's descendants included future prime ministers, Confederate generals, composers, mathematicians, socialites and royalty. Today, some of her surviving jewels nestle in the collection of the Grimaldi royal family of Monaco - who are also her descendants. She was, quite simply, the most spectacular social climber of her century and the trick behind her success was that she hid it so well. Gabrielle seemed so perfectly well-mannered, so at ease in herself and so completely indifferent to the usual mechanisms of "high society," that for decades after she was dead, she was still held up as the ultimate icon of the old aristocracy's wealth, supreme indifference to the outside world and entrenched privilege. She made it look effortless, just like the supremely affected unaffectedness in the Lebrun portrait of her. No-one ever saw Gabrielle's little feet paddling desperately beneath the water - all they saw was the gorgeously self-confident swan representing "all the glories of those set apart by privilege and wealth, flaunting themselves once more like the last beacon of an expiring world."

How not to respond to a blog post

A few months ago, I blogged about a debate in London over a tourist poster that showed Mary I, sometimes known as "Bloody Mary," transforming into a zombie-demon. Aside from being stupid and ugly, which for me is the main criteria for condemning it, the poster had also thrown yummy mummies and historians in the Greater London area into something of a tizz. The mummies were mad because the ghoulish hologram traumatised their young progeny and the historians were face-palming all over the show because the advert perpetuated the idea that Mary Tudor was a blood-sucking hellish sociopath, who liked to beat young babies with her rosary beads and toss virtuous Protestant maidens into Vatican-sponsored incinerators. 

For those of you not up to date on your Tudor historiography, Mary I (painted above in 1544) was Henry VIII's eldest daughter; she ruled England, Wales and Ireland from July 1553 until her death in November 1558. During those five years, nearly 300 Protestants were burned to death for their faith, which led to the devoutly Catholic queen being nicknamed "Bloody Mary" when her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, took the throne in 1558. Amongst historians, there has recently been a huge debate over whether or not Mary was quite the bloodthirsty incompetent that later Protestant historians portrayed her as; this is something which I did acknowledge in my post, but I did say that I think the rehabilitation of Mary might have gone a little bit too far.

Listen, I genuinely don't think that Mary Tudor was some sort of proto-Nazi who got her jollies from having hundreds of Protestants and anabaptists tortured and killed. But I do think that even by the standards of the Spanish Inquisition, she was a harsh and consistent persecutor of the nation's heretic minority. I think the pendulum of Marian revision has swung too far in the pro-Mary direction and to agree with the wonderful Leanda de Lisle, who spoke last week, we shouldn't have too "cuddly" a version of Mary. Or of any of the Tudors. They ruled as semi-absolute monarchs in a cut-throat and turbulent century. Cruelty, in one way or the other, was to be expected.

Anyway, after expressing the view that I think Elizabeth was more competent than Mary, I received this snippy little comment from a (you guessed it) anonymous reader. Ordinarily, I'd just post the comment and leave it at that, because apparently everyone has the right to free speech. But today, I thought - "Screw it." Actually, they don't. If they're going to be stupid, you should shut up. So, here's looking at you, Anonymous. The comment begins with a quote from my original article: - 

"The successes of Mary's reign do deserve to be analysed and appreciated for what they were, but the ludicrous revisionist attempt to suggest that the burnings were not unpopular or that the triumph of Protestantism was some weird Elizabethan fluke deserves to be treated with more than a little self-satisfied contempt." 

Oh please, you honestly think that with Protestants still an extreme minority in England (with no majority in any city to the extent that existed on the continent), and with the majority of the country pretty comfortable with Catholicism, that England would still have become protestant if there had been a Catholic heir after Mary? Especially one ruling for 40 years, and when they were implementing the same Counter-Reformation techniques that were so successful later in other places in Europe? (Except that they were doing it before the Council of Trent had even finished). How do you think that would have happened, exactly?
While Elizabeth was pretty talented, the fact that she was Protestant and ruled for 40 years is a MAJOR factor in the triumph of Protestantism, and to not recognize that is ludicrous in of itself. 
And honestly, what evidence do you have that the burnings really made people convert to Protestantism, etc? Foxe could only come up with one name, a guy who was already considering it before the burnings began. I know it seems like common sense to our modern sensibilities, but the fact is we just don't know how people felt about them. John Foxe's maltreatment of a lot of sources leading to his book often being the only one about many aspects of the burning certainly doesn't help. 

Well, let me begin by saying that starting a comment with the phrase 'Oh, please,' is the intellectual equivalent of a man stuffing a sock down his pants. You're trying to make yourself seem bigger than you are and it's not working. If you were intellectually capable of prosecuting the argument you're about to make, you wouldn't try to belittle your opponent through condescension before even starting. Would you? I.e. if you really were that big, you wouldn't need the sock. 

You ask, incredulously: "You honestly think..." - well, yes, I do, actually. Otherwise, I wouldn't have written it. A strange fluke I picked up at Oxford, I suppose.

You asked about a Catholic heir and what I think would have happened if Mary had produced one. Well, first of all, I have no idea about 'what if' because it's not real history, but if Mary had produced a child that was raised a Catholic, then, yes, I do think England might still be Catholic. However, I was a little confused about the next line of your argument because you seem curiously ill-informed about the exact nature of the Elizabethan religious settlement. You seem to be implying that it was Queen Elizabeth's religious faith, coupled with her longevity, that explains entirely the eventual triumph of Protestantism in England. Elizabeth I was, in fact, far more 'catholic' than is traditionally supposed. Like most of the country, she was what you called 'pretty comfortable with Catholicism'. But again, like most of the country, that comfort with traditional religion, (which is what it should be called rather than Catholicism, by the way), did not stop her siding with religious reformism after 1558. Why? Well, it seems that whilst most people were happy to conform, by 1558, they had lived under so many different variations of Christianity thanks to Henry, Edward and Mary that they were probably happy to adapt to any kind of "pick-n-mix" version of the "One True Faith," provided they were left in peace. It's not the stuff of martyrs, but there had been enough of them already, I suppose. Most people were comfortable with whatever was put in front of them, because they wanted to live, love and prosper without the fear of dying because of where they went on a Sunday. Under Mary and Elizabeth, those who chose to die for their faith made up an insignificant percentage of the population. And in both cases, the heroism of those martyrs led to them becoming ideological celebrities, both in their own time and in ours. 

Anyway, the so-called "via media" or Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559-1650 was not simply a result of the new Queen's allegedly protestant faith, like you suggested. Had Elizabeth had her way - which you seem to think she had - then, in fact, she would have produced a much more 'catholic' Church of England. Yes, it would have been separate from the jurisdiction of the Papal See, as it had been in her father's reign,  and there'd have been a serious trimming back on time devoted to the Virgin Mary and the saints. (And I for one am not thrilled about that, by the way - I love me some Hail Marys. But I digress.) Anyway, overall, if Elizabeth Tudor had gotten her own way, then the new Church of England would have been far more traditional in its liturgies, practices and hierarchy. However, this did not happen and that's because from the moment of her accession, Elizabeth was under sustained political pressure from the House of Commons and the emergent Puritan faction of elected MPs, who collectively forced Elizabeth to move "Left" on her religious settlement. Put simply, by 1559, the hostility towards Catholicism or traditional religion had solidified within much wider sections of the rural and urban elite than had been the case in 1553 - before Mary I took the throne. Why? Well, the obvious argument would be that  between 1554 and 1558, the burnings instituted by Mary Tudor's regime did harden hostility against Catholicism within the educated sectors of English society; meaning that when Elizabeth took the throne in November 1558, she found it impossible to ignore the concerns of the landed gentry and the elected politicians, all of whom put her under considerable pressure to create a far more 'protestant' Church of England. If you want evidence that the burnings were unpopular, then, I'm afraid, that's where it is. Whilst I understand that you're attempting to claim that the vast majority of English people didn't mind the 300 deaths by burning, it is quite simply absurd to make such a sweeping statement. You ask how I know the burnings weren't popular - one could justifiably flip the question and ask how do you know they were? The sad fact for historians is that we have almost no surviving sources that reflect public opinion amongst the majority of English Christians. The only parish records that survive and give any real kind of insight into grass-roots religious opinions are from the parishes that caused trouble to the government. In Mary's reign, those were the parishes that were too reformist; in Elizabeth's, they were the ones that were too conservative. I mean, maybe I'm wrong and you're right. Maybe you have a mass producing ouija board with impeccable results and a lot of time on your hands? But short of that, I'm not entirely sure how you could be any more clear about what the majority of Mary and Elizabeth's subjects thought than the rest of us are.

What is clear is that by the time Elizabeth came to the throne, the heresy trials and executions had galvanised opinion within a sizable section of the English and Welsh elite. Had that not existed, then the church Elizabeth created would have been very different and she would not have had to give way on things like church decorations, the Book of Common Prayer, clerical celibacy and clerical vestments. All of which she did, eventually, have to concede on in order to appease Protestant political pressure.

Of course, the main point of this is that whilst your arguments are wrong, you had the right to make them and it is always interesting to hear what readers think. However, your tone was smug, patronising and you entered the comment anonymously. To paraphrase a friend of mine - anonymity is tolerated, but manners are mandatory. Your comment was as irritating as it was stupid - and I've had quite enough of receiving remarks like it. I enjoy the debate - it's what history is about. I don't enjoy rudeness or running from one's own comments. It's cowardly and it's annoying. I don't write this blog to deal with passive aggressive nonsense from pseudo-intellectuals who can't sign their own names to their comments. 

Thank you.

You can read the original article here.

A History of Modern Ireland: The coming of the Penal Laws

A Note

The history of Ireland is a complex and controversial subject. The relationship between the past and prejudice is symbiotic. The fury, passion and venom that it is still capable of provoking in people - many of whom have never set foot in Ireland - is a testament to the enduring power of the island's story. This post and those that follow it serve no political agenda; they are simply a result of my historical curiosity in Ireland's political history from the 1600s until the present day. This is not an attempt to justify or demonise what happened in Irish history. It is simply an attempt to present the story of Irish politics - from the birth of the "Ascendancy parliament" in the 1690s -  until Partition, as fairly and rationally as I can. Some of the phrases used have been simplified so that those unfamiliar with Irish history might be able to follow it. Any offensive republican or unionist comments left - particularly any implying that a particular group does not "belong" in Ireland - will not be approved for publication. Discussion is encouraged; manners are demanded.

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The events which were to define Ireland in the eighteenth century actually began in England in the seventeenth century, with a crisis inside the Royal Family. In 1660, Charles II became king and throughout the twenty-five years he sat on the throne, more and more people became concerned about his Portuguese wife’s failure to have any children (right). The next in line to the throne was Charles’s younger brother, Prince James, Duke of York. James - a tall, blond and handsome war hero - had once been very popular, before he took the decision to convert to Catholicism in 1669. James’s first wife had been a Protestant and the couple had two daughters together, Mary and Anne, who were born before their father became a Catholic; they remained Protestant. After their mother’s death, James re-married to Princess Maria-Beatrice of Modena, an exceptionally beautiful Italian princess, who was also a Catholic. James became King James II in 1685 and there were many people who were extremely unhappy at the idea of a Catholic king. However, Queen Maria-Beatrice still had no children and the general consensus was that James II should be allowed to stay on the throne until he died, when the throne would pass to his eldest daughter from his first marriage, Mary, a Protestant who had recently married her cousin, Prince William of Orange, one of the most powerful Protestant princes in Europe. 

Then, in 1688, the Queen gave birth to a healthy baby boy and Protestant politicians began to fear that this would mean a line of Catholic kings stretching far into the future. Determined to bring down James II and prevent his son from inheriting the throne, Protestant members of the royal family, parliament and the army began to spread a false rumour that the new baby prince was not in fact the king’s son. They claimed that Maria-Beatrice had really given birth to a dead child; the dead child had been smuggled out of the palace by her Catholic advisers and then one of her priests had brought in a healthy male child who was passed off as her son. This vile scandal, known as “the Warming Pan Scandal,” resulted in a series of riots and unrest. Terrified, Queen Maria-Beatrice fled under the cover of night to nearby France, taking her baby with her. King James, too, was forced to flee, when William of Orange invaded with an army. In 1689, Parliament declared that James II was no longer legally king and that William of Orange was now King William III. He would share the throne with his wife, Queen Mary II. It was the only time in British history, so far, the monarchy operated under something called “shared sovereignty.”

The sinking of the "Príncipe de Asturias"

The Príncipe de Asturias was built in Scotland in 1912 and, along with her sister ship the Infanta Isabel, she was one of the largest ships in the Spanish merchant fleet. Spain's commercial shipping did not rival Britain's or Germany's in size at the time and the Príncipe de Asturias (named after the title traditionally given to the heirs to the Spanish throne) weighed 8,400-tons, with room for 1800 passengers. 

Spain under King Alfonso XIII stayed neutral during the First World War. There seemed no obvious territorial or commercial benefit to embroiling herself in the conflict, furthermore she had no major long-standing alliance with any of the combatants. The Royal Family itself was divided on the issue - King Alfonso's mother, the 'tall, fair and sensible' Maria-Christina, was an Austrian archduchess by birth; his wife, Queen Victoria-Eugenie (often known as Ena), was a British princess, the cousin of King George V, but she was also Kaiser Wilhelm II's cousin and had a host of German relatives. Furthermore, public opinion in Spain was divided between the Allies and the Central Powers. 

With Spain officially neutral and King Alfonso's government acting alongside Sweden and Switzerland as a diplomatic conduit for many official negotiations between the warring powers, commercial life continued much as before in the Iberian kingdom. In 1916, the Príncipe de Asturias was re-assigned to operate the route between Barcelona and Buenos Aires. On a return visit in March 1916, the ship was sailing off the coast of Brazil in a dense fog, when she ran aground of a partially submerged sandback near the city of São Sebastião. The captain attempted to turn the ship towards the nearby port of Santos, but the damage sustained was too extensive. Tragically, the Príncipe de Asturias sank shortly before sunrise on 5th March, 1916, with the loss of 445 lives. 

Belfast's Lord Mayor to resign early in order to avoid meeting the Queen

Only a few weeks after officially unveiling the city's beautiful new memorial gardens to mark the centenary of the Titanic disaster, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Niall O Donnghaile (26), the youngest incumbent of the office in history, is to resign early from his post in order to avoid meeting Her Majesty the Queen during the 2012 Diamond Jubilee celebrations. An official visit by the Sovereign to Northern Ireland will be an accepted part of the Jubilee festivities, although Buckingham Palace has not yet confirmed a date.

Mr O Donnghaile is a member of Sinn Fein, the left-wing republican party strongly in favour of Irish unification. It is currently the second largest political party in Northern Ireland, with 29 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly. (The largest party is the right-wing, pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, with 38 seats; in third place is another conservative, pro-British party, the Ulster Unionists, with 18.) Mr O Donnghaile's successor is tipped to be a member of the DUP, Mr Gavin Robinson, but Mr O Donnghaile's refusal to associate himself with the monarchist Jubilee means that the election for his replacement has been moved forward to Friday June 1st, the day before the official nationwide Jubilee celebrations begin.

Sources from within Belfast City Hall have confirmed that for the first time in Belfast's history standing orders have been changed to allow the new Lord Mayor to be elected at a meeting on that Friday.  Normally, only special meetings are held on Fridays.

Speaking on behalf of Sinn Fein, Mr J. McVeigh, the group's party leader on Belfast City Council, said: “We knew that the Jubilee celebrations were coming up and had a discussion with the DUP about that. We were happy to come out of that role and they were happy to come in a little bit early because of the issue of the anniversary. We as republicans obviously are not keen to celebrate the Jubilee in any shape or form. But, we have supported the recent round of funding when it came before council and we are happy for unionists to celebrate if they so wish. But, it is not something that we would be involved in as republicans. This is as much about accommodating the unionists as about us not wanting to be part of the Jubilee celebrations. We are republicans and have no great love for the royalty in any shape or form. We do not want to be part of the celebrations. A unionist Mayor would love to be on that seat when a member of the Royalty or maybe even the Queen herself comes to Belfast.”

Apparently, since Mr O Donnghaile's term was nearly up anyway, the decision was reached by general consensus between the unionists and republicans on the council. In February, many of the Sinn Fein councillors had voted to approve the spending of £56,000 (about USD 90,000) towards local community organisations across Belfast who wanted to organise their own celebrations for the Diamond Jubilee.

Some other unionists, however, are apparently angry at Mr O Donnghaile's decision and describe it as a snub to the apparently apolitical nature of the Lord Mayor's office and to the wider Protestant community in Belfast. Last year, one of the most prominent figures in Sinn Fein, Martin McGuinness, unsuccessfully ran for the presidency of the Irish republic; when asked in interviews if he would meet the Queen when she made a state visit to Ireland, McGuinness replied that, as prospective President, he would. In light of his colleague's promise to honour the office before personal political predilection, some unionist criticism of Mr O Donnghaile has been correspondingly severe. And not for the first time. 

Last year, the current Lord Mayor sparked another political storm in Northern Ireland after he refused to present a certificate to a 14-year-old Army cadet during a Duke of Edinburgh awards ceremony. The Army cadets prepare young people for a career in the Armed Forces and the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme was one established by the Queen's husband, His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Award programme offers chances to participate in physical, mental and skills-based improvement programmes across the United Kingdom to young people aged between fourteen and twenty-four, regardless of ability or background. The Duke's award offers a huge range of such programmes and Mr O Donnghaile had handed out certificates to many participants, but refused to for the 14 year-old Army cadet. The backlash against the decision was strong, even from many Irish nationalist politicians. He also caused outrage amongst unionists and liberals when he became Lord Mayor of Belfast last year and insisted upon removing royal portraits from his parlour.


Speaking of his decision to step-down a few weeks early, the former Lord Mayor of Belfast, Jim Rodgers, a member of the centre-right Ulster Unionist Party, said, "It is definitely a snub... When I was Lord Mayor I met a wide range of people from both sides. I was criticised both publicly and privately for it — but I believe you have to lead to the city and you have to be above politics. Unfortunately this current Lord Mayor has been one of the most political that I can remember in more than 20 years in council." 

Saint Jude

Saint Jude the Apostle, identified with Thaddaeus the Apostle by some (but not all) historians of the Church, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Christ and a relative of Jesus and Mary. Both he and the traitor-apostle, Judas Iscariot, would have shared essentially the same name - a variant of the word "Judah". He was a relative, probably a cousin, of Saint James the Just, and ancient writers tell us that Jude preached the gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia and Libya. According to the early Church chronicler, Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Jude then returned to Jerusalem, where he assisted with the election of Saint Simeon as bishop of Jerusalem.

Saint Jude was martyred in about 65 A.D., along with another one of the Twelve Apostles, Saint Simon the Zealot. They were preaching either in Beirut or in modern-day Iran when they were beaten to death and then beheaded. Due to this, Saint Jude the Apostle and Martyr was venerated as a saint in Christianity long before the formal process of canonisation was ratified. This is known as a "pre-congregation saint."

Today, Saint Jude is venerated by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Oriental Orthodox and Syriac Church of the East denominations of Christianity. His feast day in the Eastern communion is 19th June; in the West, it is 28th October. He is the patron saint of lost causes and cases most despaired of. He has a reputation for being one of the most faithful and beloved of Christianity's holy figures.

A beautiful prayer to Saint Jude, which I like very much, is: -

Oh Holy Saint Jude, Apostle and Martyr, great in virtue and rich in miracles, near kinsman of Jesus Christ, faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special help in time of need. 

To you I have recourse from the depths of my heart and humbly request assistance. Help me in my present and urgent petition.

In return, I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked.

Saint Jude, Apostle, martyr and relative of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Mary and Joseph, intercede for us.

I think it's lovely and I hope it helps someone! 

Writing from the Tub's review of "Popular"

The lovely Carly Bennett has written a review of my novel Popular on her blog Writing from the Tub. For those who have enjoyed Ci-Devant and might enjoy reading Popular, you can pick up copy from the UK here, Ireland here, the United States here, Canada here, Spain here, South Africa here, Australia here and New Zealand here. 

For Carly's full review and to find out some of her favourite lines from the novel, click here.

In brief: -


"We don't live in happiest of times at the moment, do we? We're in the middle of a recession, the news is all doom and gloom and, as I'm writing this review, it's pissing it down with rain. Sometimes we all need a book to dive into that takes us away from the stresses and strains of every day life. If you're looking for that book then look no further because Popular is the perfect antidote to all of your worries.

Popular will have you laughing from page one and keep you thoroughly entertained until the end of the story..."


It's always lovely reading reviews like this and a big thanks to Carly.