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A day late and a dollar short, but I didn't notice that anyone mentioned that yesterday, 1 September, was the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War which led to the end of the Balkan monarchies. __________________ 'Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked;' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.' C.S. Lewis God save His Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, etc.! Vive le Très haut, très puissant et très excellent Prince, Louis XX, Par la grâce de Dieu, Roi de France et de Navarre, Roi Très-chrétien! My blog:https://musingsofanoldcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/ | |
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SEPTEMBER 2nd 44 B.C. - Several months after the murder of his father and his mother's return to Egypt, 3 year-old Prince Ptolemy Caesar is proclaimed Pharaoh Ptolemy XV, known by his nickname of Caesarion. He is officially proclaimed co-ruler with his mother, Queen Cleopatra VII, in a ceremony at the Ptolemaic palace complex in Alexandria followed by requisite ceremonies at the urban temples of Isis, Serapis and Horus. All practical authority is, of course, kept in the hands of the Queen-Pharaoh. 1540 - Emperor Dawit II of Ethiopia is killed in battle at Debre Damo, defending his country from Islamic incursions. He is succeeded by his son, Emperor Gelawdewos. 1753 - (Above) In Turin, within the walls of the Royal Palace, the queen-consort of Sardinia, Maria-Antoinetta of Spain, gives birth to her husband, King Vittorio-Amedeo III's, second daughter. The child is christened Princess Maria-Giuseppina-Liugia but is better known by her French name of Marie-Josephine under which guise she married the grandson of King Louis XV of France, then the comte de Provence. It was a miserable marriage, with one courtier acidly observing that the princess had more hair on her face than her hair, but nonetheless following the death of King Louis XVII in custody in 1795, Marie-Josephine became de jure queen-consort of France and Navarre as her husband became Louis XVIII, king-in-exile. Reconciled with her husband, she passed away at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire four years before the de facto Restoration of the monarchy in France. Her funeral in Westminster Abbey was a magnificent affair, attended by the Royal Families of France and Great Britain, during which Napoleonic spies reported back the names of the hundreds of loyal exiles who had also come to pay their final respects. | |
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Dawit II (more commonly refered to as Emperor Libne Dingel) actually died of illness and a broken heart and not in battle. Ethiopia had been largely overrun by the Islamic forces of Ahmed Ibin Al Ghazi, Imam of the Adal, (known to this day by Ethiopian Christians as Mohammed "Gragn" or "The Left Handed"). He had managed to burn hundreds of towns and villiages, churches and monasteries, destroy thousands of priceless and invaluable ancient manuscripts and libraries and looted an untold number of treasures. The great monastery of Debre Libanos, the holy Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion, the gold adorned Mekane Selassie(Dwelling place of the Trinity) Churchand incomparable monastery of Bete Semayat (House of Heaven) were among those torched. Monks and nuns were slaughtered, andthousands of the faithful were killed, enslaved or driven into exile.Where Ethiopia just before the Gragn wars was described byvisiting Catholic priest Fransisco Alvares as aprosperousland comprable and even surpassing many European states in it's level of development and the magnificence of it's Imperial court,it would never recover from the devastation of the Gragn warsand was setback drastically.Indeed many believe it has never recovered. Juan Bermudez, an envoy of theKing of Portugal who had lived in Ethiopia for almosta decade was dispatched to Europe to plead for help. He arrived in Rome in 1536after an arduous and eventful adventure traveling secretly through muslim ruled Egypt and Jerusalem and horrified Pope Paul III with his tale of burned churches and monasteries, slaughtered monks and nuns, and a royal family decended from Solomon himself, reduced to hiding in caves and forests. The King of Portugal dispatched a force under Dom ChristoforoDa Gama (younger son of navigator VascoDa Gama).Before they could arrive however, Gragn killed Emperor Libne Dingil'seldest son Fiqtor (Vitor) and captured and enslaved his third son Minas in battle, presenting the younger prince as a gift to the Turkish governor of Aden. News of the killing of his eldest son and the enslavement of his younger son was too much for the Emperor to bear. In utter dispair, he went into a rapid decline of health and died on a mountain top fortress near the monastery of Debre Damo (itself located on an impregnable cliff surrounded mountaintop). When his retainers asked the monks of the monastery to recieve the body of the dead monarch, they refused, fearful that if they buried Dawit II at Debre Damo, Gragn would focus all his forces on thier mountain which had so far escaped being overrun by him thanks to it's topography. The Emperor's body was taken to Debarowa, the seat of the ruler of Bahir Midr province (roughly modern Eritrea), the Bahar Negash (King of the Seas) Yisaq who was a maternal cousin of the late Emperor. Bahir Negash Yisaq returned to Debre Damo and kneltbelow the cliffs surrounding the monastery tearfully pleading with the monks who relented and buried Libne Dingel, Dawit II. His young son, Gelawdewos (Claudius)was proclaimed Emperor with the nom-de-guerre of "Astnaf Seged" (He to whom the horizon bows). Dom Christoforo and his forces arrived, and combined with the army of the Bahir Negash Yisaq, faced Gragn in Akale Guzai (a district in what is now southern Eritrea) in 1541 and although the Portuguese had brought canons (something that the Turkish armed forces of Gragn had never seen before), the battle was inconclusive, and Dom Christoforo was wounded and later captured thanks to the betrayal of his Turkish bornmistress. Gragn who was also woundedcame to see his illustrous prisoner and urged De Gama toconvert to Islam, whereupon Dom Christoforo spat in his face. Gragn is said to have personally beheaded Christoforo Da Gama on the spot. In the mean time Gragn sent a plea to the Pasha of Aden for more weapons to counteract the Portuguese canons before the forces of the Bahir Negash and the Portuguese could combine with the armies of the Dowager Empress Seble Wongel. Little did he know that not only were these forces already combining, but they would shortly be joined by the forces of the valiant young Emperor Gelawdiwos himself. The tide had turned in favor of the Christian Empire once more.... __________________ The Lion of Judah hath prevailed.Ethiopia stretches her hands unto God (Quote from Psalm 68 which served as the Imperial Motto of the Ethiopian Empire)"God and history shall remember your judgment." (Quote from Emperor Haile Selassie I's speech to the League of Nations to plead for assistance against the Italian Invasion, 1936.) | |
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A very stirring and romantic albeit tragic tale, thanks. | |
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SEPTEMBER 3rd 1189 - At Westminster Abbey, Richard the Lionheart is crowned King of the English just over three months after inheriting the throne from his late father, Henry II. The new monarch is also Duke of the Normans and Aquitanians and Count of the Angevins and Lord of Ireland. 1499 - At the château de Saint-Vallier, French noblewoman Jeanne de Batarnay, wife of the Seigneur de St.-Vallier, gives birth to a daughter, christened Diane. At the age of fifteen, this pretty aristocratic child will marry the seigneur d'Anet, another local nobleman, but it was in her widowed guise as the ethereally beautiful Diane de Poitiers that she would become best-known to posterity as the confidante of François I and life-long mistress of his son, Henri II, who was two decades her junior. As the King's official mistress, she wielded enormous control over court and government, only falling from favour when Henri was killed in a riding accident and power transferred to his widow, Catherine de' Medici. 1651 - The last major battle of the English Civil War, the battle of Worcester, is fought between the forces of the Commonwealth and those of King Charles II. The republican troops outnumbered the monarchists by almost 12,000 men, The royalist forces suffer a defeat and the Sovereign is forced to seek refuge at the court of his mother's family in France and for a time at that of his sister in the Netherlands. 1658 - Seven years to the day after his army's triumph at Worcester, Oliver Cromwell, self-created "Lord Protector of England," died in the Palace of Whitehall after once again succumbing to malarial fever. Combined with his history of urinary and kidney infections, Cromwell's death is relatively swift and one Venetian observer remarked that his physicains may have mismanaged his health - a common criticism in the century. Louis XV's governess would barricade her charge within her apartments when disease swept the palace, insisting they would do more harm than good. Alternative theories suggest that the actual cause of death may have been septicaemia, rather than malarial fever - which he had perhaps contracted in Ireland years before and survived. He is succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard, but the dictator's death deals a body-blow to the Commonwealth from which it never recovers, paving the way for a de facto restoration of the monarchy two years later. 1792 - (Above.) In a wave of government-promoted anti-royalist hysteria, a Parisian mob storms the prisons to liquidate royalist enemies of the Revolution. In the ensuing slaughter, many of the victims were apolitical. Forty prostitutes held at La Salpêtrière were sexually assaulted before being murdered by the crowds, in Bicêtre where most of the prisoners were adolescent boys the killing turned into "systematic butchering," with 43 of the 162 victims being under the age of eighteen - the youngest being aged 12 and personally killed by the Warden, who was technically in charge of the inmates' safety. Aside from many Catholic martyrs, the most famous victim of the day was the confidante of the imprisoned queen, Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse Louise, princesse de Lamballe, then incarcerated in a cell with the former royal governess, the marquise de Tourzel. The marquise escaped with the help of a mysterious rescuer, who may have formed the later inspiration for the fictitious Scarlet Pimpernel and who may very well have been the monarchist spy, baron de Batz, a descendant of the real-life inspiration for Dumas's D'Artagnan. In a bestselling bicentennial history of the Revolution, one left-wing British historian wrote: - "At La Force, the Princesse de Lamballe passed the time by reading devotional manuals and attempting to comfort the terrified ladies-in-waiting to the Queen. Confronted by another of the improvised courts that would be judge, jury and executioner, she was asked if she knew of the "plots of the tenth of August," and responded courageously that she was aware of no plots on that day. Required to swear an oath of loyalty to Liberty and Equality and one of hatred against the King, Queen and monarchy, she accepted the first but refused the latter. A door was opened off the interrogation room, where she saw men waiting with axes and pikes. Pushed into an alley, she was hacked to death in minutes. Her clothes were stripped from her body to join the immense pile that would later be sold at public auction, and her head was struck off and stuck on a pike... Her head was carried in triumph through the streets of Paris to the Temple, where one of the crowd barged into the King's rooms to demand that the Queen show herself at the window to see her friend's head, "so you may know how the people avenge themselves on tyrants." Marie-Antoinette spared herself this torment by fainting on the spot, but the valet de chambre peered through the blinds to see the blond curls of the Princesse de Lamballe bobbing repellently in the air. For [20th century historian] Pierre Caron this kind of thing was no more than the regrettably inevitable "excesses" committed at such moments of mass hysteria. He describes the exhibition of the Lamballe head noncommittally aws "the custom of those days," as though it were some picturesque folk pastime. And he goes to great lengths to dismiss stories of other atrocities as self-evident myths and items of royalist martyrology... but Caron's dismissal was based partly on their not being included in the revolutionary sources to which he gives exclusive credence, and partly on his refusal to believe that human beings, especially those claiming to act in the name of the Sovereign People, could have perpetrated anything so obscene. He was writing, however, in 1935. Ten years later, European history was again disabused of the notion that modernity somehow confers exemption from bestial*ty." 1851 - In the Grand Palace of Pavlovsk, nineteen miles outside the imperial capital of Saint Petersburg, Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg, Grand duch*ess of Russia by marriage, gives birth to a daughter who is christened Olga Konstantinovna, taking the patronym of her father, the pro-liberalisation Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaivich, son of the reigning emperor, Tsar Nicholas I. The Romanov baby is the couple's second child and at the age of sixteen she married George I, King of Greece. Thus, Olga became Queen-consort of the Hellenes and the mother of eight children - including the future King Constantine, a High Commissioner of Crete, the mother of Grand Duke Dmitri who was involved in the Rasputin assassination of 1916 and the father of the current duke of Edinburgh. The widowed Queen died at the age of 74 in France in 1926, with her remains being returned to the Greek royal crypt at Tatoi a decade later. Extract taken from: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Professor Simon Schama | |
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SEPTEMBER 5th 1187 - In Paris, Isabelle of Hainaut, seventeen year-old queen-consort of Philippe II Auguste, King of France, gives birth to her only son, the future King Louis VIII, who will earn the sobriquet of "the Lion," during a short reign which will last from 1223 until 1226. He has the distinction of being the royal father of two saints - St. King Louis IX and Saint Isabel of France. 1548 - At Sudeley Castle, one of the homes of her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, the Lord High Admiral, Katharine Parr, Queen-Dowager of England and Ireland, and widow of the late King Henry VIII, dies at the age of thirty-six of post-natal complications. A sympathetic modern historian narrates the queen's passing: - "Hours after the birth, she was laid low with puerperal fever, that scourge of medieval and Tudor childbeds, and remained delirious for almost a week. With each passing day, it became more obvious that she was not going to recover. In her delirium, she spoke of her anguish over her husband's faithlessness and betrayal, which was to trouble her to the end, and which she no longer had the strength or wit to conceal. On 5 September, Lady Tyrwhitt went into the Queen's bedchamber to bid her good morning and see if there was any improvement in her condition. Katherine was half-lucid, and asked Lady Tyrwhitt where she been for so long, saying 'that she did fear such things in herself that she was sure she could not live'. Lady Tyrwhitt replied, with feigned confidence, 'that I saw no likelihood of death in her.' But Katherine was not listening ... the Admiral was by the bed, and she grasped his hand, saying, 'My Lady Tyrwhitt, I am not well handled, for those that are about me care not for me, but stand laughing at my grief, and the more good I will to them, the less good they will to me.' There was shocked silence, then the Admiral hastened to reassure her saying, 'Why, sweetheart! I would you no hurt!' To which Katherine replied, with heavy irony, 'No, my lord, I think so.' Then, as he leaned over her, she whispered, 'But, my lord, you have given me many shrewd taunts.' ... The Queen's tirade against the Admiral continued for more than an hour, and was heard by the ladies about her bedside, though they did not leave accounts of it for posterity. Later that day, Katherine's fever subsided, leaving her with no recollection of what she had said. She was very weak, and realised, with her usual common sense, that she was dying, and that it would be best to make her will now, while she was in possession of her senses. Writing materials were brought by her secretary, and the Queen dictated, "I, Katharine Parr, etc., lying on my death-bed, sick of body but of good mind and perfect memory and discretion and perceiving the extremity of death to approach me, give all to my married spouse and husband..." The will was then signed by the Queen and witnessed by Dr. Huicke and her chaplain, John Parkhurst, who gave her the last rites soon afterwards. We do not know if the Queen asked to see her baby daughter before the end, nor are her last words recorded, nor are any details of her death, which occurred ... between two and three in the morning." 1638 - After years of agony over her lack of child, Anne of Austria, queen-consort of Louis XIII, King of France, is safely delivered of a Dauphin at the royal château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The infant, the future King Louis XIV, is given the second Christian name of "Deodatus," translating as "God-given." A modern historian reflects on the future monarch's birth: - "How miraculous was this birth, so unexpected and so awe-inspiring for the mother? Certainly a great deal of prayer had been applied to the subject as the years passed. There were pilgrimages to shrines, as befitted a Queen who throughout her life liked nothing so much as to visit convents and holy places... The Queen was fast approaching the age at which child-bearing itself was felt to be unlikely [and] the sexuality of the husband of this romantic and unfulfilled woman was what would now be called troubled... A nun, a former favourite of Louis XIII, Angélique de La Fayette, was said to have asked her priest to choose a great feast of the Church - presumably the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December - to remind her platonic patron of his conjugal duties: the result was the conception of a more earthly sort. One story however does have the distinction of being believed by Queen Anne herself, and later by her son. This was the prediction in a Parisian monastery of a monk named Brother Fiacre, to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in a vision on 3 November 1637 ... It was evident that Brother Fiacre's sincerity had made a great impression on Queen Anne when they met. Six years later, she called the monk to her presence again with the words: "I have not forgotten the signal grace you have obtained for me from the Blessed Virgin who gave me a son. I have had a great picture made where he is represented in front of the mother of God to whom he offers his crown and sceptre.' ... A more down-to-earth explanation was provided by a story involving Louis XIII, a hunting expedition near Paris cut short by an unexpected storm, and given that the King's separate apartments at the Louvre were not prepared, the need to take refuge in those of his wife on the night of 5 December 1637. The result of this unscheduled propinquity was Louis, born exactly nine months later ... It was on Sunday 4 September that the Queen finally went into labour at the royal château of Saint-Germain. This wondrous castle, adjacent to the small town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ten miles from Paris, was raised high over the curving banks of the Seine. The air was pure. There were gardens and terraces going down to the river, in which it was fashionable for both ladies and gentlemen of the court to swim. Close by lay the forests so vital to the main royal leisure pursuit of hunting ... The labour took place in public, or at any rate in the presence of the court, as was the royal custom of the time, so as to prevent the possible substitution of a living baby for a dead one - or a son for a daughter... It was 11:20 a.m. on Sunday morning 5 September 1638 that the Queen's ordeal came to an end and hats were hurled violently, joyously, into the air. 'We have a Dauphin!' declared Louis XIII. It was 'the time when the Virgin was at her greatest strength', wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in Le Bonheur de Jour the next year ... And so the child who had been mature enough to be born with two teeth - auspicious in a male, less so for his wet-nurses - embarked on his life with cries of joy ringing in his ears: first of the court, then in the little town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, gradually spreading through all France." 1666 - The Great Fire of London comes to an end, revealing the devastation that it has wrought in the old city. The most famous casualty being the medieval splendour of Saint Paul's Cathedral. Climbing to the top of All-Hallows-by-the-Tower church to Saint Mary the Virgin, Samuel Pepys, his shoes singed from the smoldering ruins of the capital, surveyed the scene, calling it "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw." 13,200 private residences and 87 churches had vanished in the fire, although the royal palaces had more or less been spared since the fire failed to reach the chief administrative and aristocratic quarter of Westminster. Both the King and his brother, the duke of York, who has apparently been named "S éamas an Chaca," for alleged cowardice by Irish rebels, won popular acclaim for their extraordinary bravery in personal fighting the fire with the fire-fighting teams during the horrors of the Fire.1698 - In attempt to push through further Westernisation of his Empire, Tsar Peter the Great introduces a punitive tax on long beards, a distinctive cultural marker of the old Muscovite boyar classes. 1725 - At Versailles, the fifteen year-old Sovereign, Louis XV, marries the 21 year-old daughter of the deposed King of Poland, Maria Leszczy?ska. Maria is plain, demure and pious and many of the courtiers at Versailles are outraged that a princess of insufficient grandeur had been chosen to be the First Lady of Versailles. However, the reasons for the marriage were sound - although of royal lineage, the princess's family were deposed and thus presented no foreign entanglements to the foreign policy of Cardinal Fleury, the king's premier and mentor. She had been chosen from a list of ninety-nine princesses and grand ladies, but her royal ancestry, Catholic faith and the fact that her family had no previous blood-ties to the French royal house made her the most desirable candidate. 1771 - (Above) In the city of Florence, in modern-day Italy but then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, María-Luísa of Spain, Grand duch*ess-consort of Tuscany and wife of Leopold, future Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, gives birth to her third son, Charles, named in honour of his maternal grandfather, Emperor Charles VI. The child will eventually duke of Teschen but, despite his epilepsy, he will receive most of his fame as being a valiant opponent of Bonapartism, and as a courageous field-marshal and reformist of the Austrian military. He will marry the lovely Princess Henrietta-Alexandrine of Nassau-Weilburg and father seven children, including Maria-Teresa, future queen-consort of the Two Sicilies. He died in 1847. 1793 - Although it had long been the practice, on this day, almost a year to the day since the September Massacres and the martyrdom of the princesse de Lamballe, the leaders of the French Republic announce an official policy of Terror to govern the nation. 1816 - Faced with an unexpected landslide electoral victory for the ultra-royalists, which sees them win 350 of the 402 available seats, King Louis XVIII of France panics their refusal to accept any form of compromise and to try and push the clock back to pre-1787 will topple the social balance of Restorationist France. Heeding the advice of his premier, the duc de Richelieu, and the duke of Wellington, the King disbands the Chamber, which he himself disparagingly dubbed the "La Chambre introuvable." In the following elections, the Ultras refusal to compromise on anything, even when faced with disbandment, cost them the election. Liberal royalists, the Doctrinaires, carry the victory and it is not until 1823, under the leadership of the comte de Villèle, that the Ultras re-take the Chamber. 1905 - In New Hampshire, President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States of America, successfully brokers the Treaty of Portsmouth, bringing to an end the Russo-Japanese War, which had raged since the previous year. In an eerie and tragic pre-echo of what was to be-fall the United States thirty-six years later, the Japanese Navy had initiated the conflict by striking on the Tsarist fleet at Port Arthur in a pre-emptive movement, before declaring war on the Russian Empire. This, coupled with the scattered nature of the Russian Imperial Navy versus the sheer size of the Empire, meant that Emperor Nicholas II's government had suffered a humiliating defeat at Japanese hands. American negotiations, prompted by fear of what a clash of the two Empires would do to peace in the Pacific, managed to avoid too humiliating a peace being imposed upon the Russian Empire. Both empires were forced to evacuate Manchuria and hand sovereignty back to Imperial China and although the Japanese were allowed access to the vast Russian-built railway network in Manchuria and were granted control of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, their victory was nowhere near as punitive or conclusive as they had expected. When details of the Treaty are published, Japan is convulsed by the Hibiya Riots. Russia, too, is left in a serious state of civil unrest, as 1905 was to turn into the nightmare year for the Tsarist monarchy, thus-far. However, thanks in part to President Roosevelt, who was awarded the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize, and the brilliance of Sergei Witte, future Russian premier, at the negotiating table, Russia had avoided the worst of the damage that they had feared at Japanese hands. 1918 - As a grotesque tribute to the French Revolution, the Bolshevik government in Russia announces the implementation of a policy of Red Terror to secure the Revolution and the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Extract taken from: The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir; Love & Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King by Lady Antonia Fraser; the diary of Mr. Samuel Pepys. | |
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SEPTEMBER 7th 1191 - In the Battle of Arsuf, during the Third Crusade, the Christian armies of Richard the Lionheart clash with the armies of ?al?? ad-D?n, inflicting a defeat upon him. 1533 - In the Queen's Apartments at Greenwich Palace, London, Anne Boleyn, 26 year-old queen-consort of England, gives birth to her first child, the future Queen Elizabeth I (above.) Eerily, given the fact that Elizabeth is later known as "the Virgin Queen," her mother Queen Anne allegedly took as a fortuitous omen various circ*mstances of her daughter's birth - she was born on the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, in a room hung with tapestries of Saint Ursula and various other virgin-saints and martyrs. Moreover, the queen's patron-saint, Anne, was the mother of the Virgin according to patristic accounts. Had it not been for the fact that the King's daughter with Katherine of Aragon already bore the name, the Queen would have preferred to christen the baby princess "Mary." However, after so much political intrigue surrounding the child's conception, the gender causes much comment, as a modern British historian writing on Elizabeth's childhood reflects: - "Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was born on Sunday, 7 September 1533 at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It was an easy birth: mother and daughter were well and the child took after her father with his fair skin and long nose. But she had her mother's coal-black eyes. These were the ordinary, human details that might characterize the birth of any baby. But Elizabeth was royal. That meant her entry into the world was vested with ceremony and hopes that went far beyond the ordinary. Indeed, as far as the hopes were concerned, they went far beyond what was usual even for a royal birth... The preparations had got underway in earnest in early August when it was decided that the birth would take place at Greenwich. This was the lovely, Thames-side palace where, forty-two years before, Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, had been born. It was the favourite palace of his mother, Elizabeth of York, and it was to become his and his daughter's favourite too. First, the Queen's bedchamber was prepared for her confinement. The walls and ceiling were close hung and tented with arras - that is, precious tapestry woven with gold or silver threads - and the floor thickly laid with rich carpets. The arras was left loose at a single window, so that the Queen could order a little light and air to be admitted, though this was generally felt to be inadvisable.... The Queen's richly hung and canopied bed was to match or be en suite with the hangings, as was the pallet or day-bed which stood at its foot. And it was on the pallet, almost certainly, that the birth took place. Carpenters and joiners had first prepared the skeleton by framing up a false ceiling in the chamber. Then the officers of the wardrobe had moved in to nail up and arrange the tapestry, carpets and hangings. At the last minute, gold and silver plate had been brought up from the Jewel House. There were cups and bowls to stand on the cupboard and crucifixes, candlesticks and images for the altar. The result was the cross between a chapel and a luxuriously padded cell... The Queen's confinement could now begin. The Victorians used the word as a euphemism, but the etiquette of the English court confined a pregnant queen indeed in a sort of purdah. Thenceforward, until the birth and her 'churching' thirty days after, she dwelt in an exclusively female world, attended solely by women. These ceremonies were ambivalent. They emphasized that childbirth was a purely female mystery. And they paid the tribute of the dominant male world to that mystery. But they did so on strict conditions: the queen, literally, had to deliver. They also underscored how inconceivable, how monstrous, even, was the notion of an unmarried and childless queen. For a queen was a breeding machine, or, as the Spanish ambassador put it only a little more elegantly, 'the entire future turns on the accouchement of the queen'. Elizabeth's career was to mount a magnificent challenge to this received wisdom; her mother's, on the other hand, was to be an awful example of its truth. But at least on this occasion, Anne Boleyn did deliver, going into labour less than a fortnight after having taken to her chamber... [but] everybody, including her own father and mother, agreed that [Elizabeth] was the wrong gender. What made it worse was that all the best astrologers and doctors had predicted a boy. Henry VIII had spent the last anxious days of his wife's confinement pondering whether to call his forthcoming son Edward or Henry and organizing the celebratory tournament. The Queen herself had the letter announcing the birth written in advance. Confidently, it gave thanks to God for sending her 'good speed, in the deliverance and bringing forth of a prince'. In the event, the King had to choose another name (he opted for his mother's). The joust was canceled. And the letter was hurriedly altered by the addition of an 's', so that God was thanked for the birth of a 'princes[s].' Nobody was deceived. It was not for this, for a daughter, that Henry VIII had risked his kingdom by divorcing his first wife, and imperilled his immortal soul by breaking with Rome. It was for a son."1683 - Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, and his empress, Eleanora-Magdalena of Neuberg, celebrate the birth of their third daughter, Maria-Anna of Austria. The Archduch*ess will later become queen-consort of Portugal through her marriage to King John V and Regent of the Portuguese Empire for the last eight years of her marriage, following her husband's debilitating stroke in 1742. 1708 - Whilst on a tour of the provinces, Tekle Haymanot I, Emperor of Ethiopia, is assassinated after a reign of just over two years when he is stabbed by various hostile courtiers. He is succeeded by his uncle, Emperor Tewoflos. 1817 - Prince Wilhelm of Hesse and his wife, Princess Charlotte, celebrate the birth of their third daughter, Louise. The Princess will later become queen-consort of Denmark through her marriage to King Christian IX and she will be known by the sobriquet of "the Grandmother of Europe," through her children - who will include Frederich VIII, King of Denmark; Alexandra, queen of the United Kingdom and empress of India; George I, King of Greece and Maria Fyodorovna, empress of All the Russias. 1822 - Brazilian independence is called for on the banks of the Ipiranga River, when the former Portuguese Regent of Brazil, Dom Pedro, son of King John VI, receives news of yet more curtailments of Brazilian autonomy in the wake of the return of central government to Portugal after the collapse of Bonapartism on the European continent. Furious, Dom Pedro - who will in time be both Emperor of Brazil and King of Portugal - unsheathes his sword, removed the crest of Portugal from his cloak and cried, "Independence or death!" Extract taken from: Elizabeth: Apprenticeship by Dr. David Starkey NB – The date of Elizabeth I’s mother in the 1533 entry is given based on the arguments that she was born in the summer of 1507 as recorded in the memoirs of the duch*ess of Feria and set forth in the work of Professor R.M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 58-9, which are far more persuasive to my mind than those arguing for the earlier date of birth of 1501, which would have made Queen Anne approximately thirty-two at the time of her first pregnancy | |
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