Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York was born in Rome. He was the last Jacobite claimant to the English crown.
He spent his entire life in the Papal States and became a cardinal.
He signed his will, Henry, Rex.
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Note: This was originally drafted in February, 2024 and not posted. In looking for something else, I can back across it.
It'll be timely for another post I'm working on.
St. King Abgar V, an Arab, and the first Christian King. He died approximatley in 50 A.D. He adopted Christianity at a time it was a minorit religion and not exactly popular. Putin and Trump are not like him.
Do not be led astray:
“Bad company corrupts good morals.”
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.
Back in the AnteCovid days which now seem like a lost world, I'd sometimes run into neo monarchist on Reddit, usually due to participating on the Distributist Sub Reddit. I quit participating there prior to the epidemic, as the discussions were really not worth participating in. Distributism is a modern economic system in its own right, but the sub tended to be populated by people who romanticized the Middle Ages, or who were Socialist trying to view everything as Socialism. An awful lot of the discussion looked like it was being conducted by 15-year-olds hiding in their parent's basements.
Among the real goofball discussions were those by monarchist. I didn't realize up until then that there are people today who long for a return of monarchy, but there are. Their typical logic was that monarchs are needed as they set the moral tone for the nation.
Hah.
Apparently these people know nothing of real monarchs, as plenty failed to live a moral life. There are very notable exceptions, some of which appear here, but they are indeed the exception that proves the rule. There's the entire problem of attacking your neighbor as you want his lands, of course, but beyond that monarchs tended to be pretty icky. It's hard to find an example of kings who didn't have mistresses, or worse. One early English king seems to have had a habit of basically sacking convents and raping nuns, which is really weird. A joke about a later one is that when he went to Monaco on vacation, the children ran out and yelled "papa" as he was just that. A Norman Christian king in Sicily kept Muslim women as concubines, to the extent that he was known as The Christian Sultan. One French king was so randy as a teenage prince that concubines were acquired to satisfy his pre marital urges.
And of course there's King Henry VIII
Even really admired ones often were problematic this way. King Charles the Great was accorded the title "blessed" for valid reasons, but Charles had at least fourteen mistresses during his lifetime and was rebuked by a noted churchman for still having an eye for the ladies well into old age. He died, I'd note, at age 72. King Cnut set his first wife aside to marry another when he became king, which was perhaps justified at the time by the fact that his first wife, a very able administrator, was a pagan and he was a Christian. Harold Godwinson, whom some in the Orthodox faith regard as a saint, put aside his first wife, Edith the Fair, in favor of Edith of Mercia, for political reasons, although legend has it that Edith the Fair was present at Hastings and identified his body. Czar Nicholas II who has been canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church for being a martyr shared, in his early years, the same mistress that his brother had.
On the latter, I'm not meaning to cast stones at these people's virtues. Czar Nicholas, for example, seems to have grown more devout after his marriage. Charles the Great spent his last months fasting and contemplating King Harold Godwinson's first marriage was complicated by the means of its contracting, and his second may have been merely political. I only note all of this as the silly devotion on Reddit to monarchy, with some of the silliness being extended to some academics, is just that, romantic silliness.
And then we have the bizarre ongoing devotion, in some Christian circles, to viewing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as saviors of Christian society.
What on earth?
This seems to have all started with the devotion that developed to Viktor Orbán in the same circles. Orbán is the champion of illiberal democracy and is blunt in his concept that Hungary is a Hungarian nationality, Christian, nation. Hungary has not collapsed into an authoritarian state as is sometimes claimed, but it's become one run by a far right nation under a party that espouses Christian Nationalism and Illiberal Democracy. Orbán is a serious Christian, although interestingly he's a Hungarian Calvinist. His wife is Catholic, as are most Hungarians, and their children were raised Catholic.
Orbán is an authoritarian by nature, although democracy is still functioning in Hungary, and he's an admirer of Putin. I think that's where the American Evangelical fascination with Putin came from.
Putin is effectively a murderer, which is widely known. His murders come through the state, of course. Before he rose up in post Communist Russia, he was an employee of the KGB. His marriage to his only wife, Lyudmila Putin, ended in divorce in 2014. His been carrying on an affair with retired Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva since prior to the divorce date, by all indications, and seems to have borne two children through the union.
Putin is at least nominally Russian Orthodox, but its hard to see it being much more than that. The Russian Orthodox Church as revived as a major Russian institution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Putin has been careful to seem to be close to Metropolitan Kirill, its head. The Metropolitan has his own checkered history, as he is rumored to have had a relationship with the KGB in the Soviet Union era. Metropolitan Kirill is extremely conservative, which is not inappropriate for the head of an Apostolic Church, and Putin has been on at least some social issues as well. This may simply be Putin's own views, or in part it may be an effort to keep the good graces of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia has been, for example, very restrictive in regard to homosexuality.
All of this leads some American Christians to believe that Putin is acting as the bulwark against the corruption of the decline of Western values, but if so, he's doing it in a very corrupt way which inclined killing people. And Putin seems to have adopted the monarch's view that he can do no wrong, to include invading the territory of Russia's neighbors, assassinations, and sleeping with a woman who much junior than his former wife.
And for American Evangelicals, it might be noted that the Russian government is actually pretty repressive towards non-Orthodox religions, particularly those that depart significantly from the main line of their branches. This has included Evangelical Protestants and the Jehovah Witnesses. This makes this one of those interesting areas in which some American Evangelicals have adopted as hero a culture which really doesn't have any sympathy for their views.
And then there's Donald Trump.
A large group of American Evangelicals have taken on the view that Donald Trump is their man, with some going much further than that. Ironically, evidence of him every actually practicing his faith, Presbyterianism, is pretty hard to find.
Trump is a serial polygamist, for one thing. In spite of American Protestantism and the American Civil Religion having come to fully accept divorce and remarriage, Christianity doesn't, and people who pretend otherwise are adopting something that's fully contrary to Christian tenants. As the Stormy Daniel affair reveals, Trump isn't beyond some really base sexual conduct. We won't even get into the allegations of other conduct. By Christian beliefs, bare minimum, Trump lives in a state of outward moral sin, which might be reduced by the doctrine of "invincible ignorance".
Trump is also a liar, cast aspersions against other people, and calls them degrading names. Lying, at least in classic Christian theology, can rise to the level of a mortal sin.
For years and years, the dominant Christian faith in the American South as been the Baptist.
Why is that?
The American Civil War had a lot to do with it.
Prior to the Civil War, in much of the South, the dominant church was the Episcopal Church. Its roots reached back to the Colonist and back to England. Most Colonist, as colonization really got rolling, were members of the Anglican Church, although other Protestant denominations were included, most notably the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Scotland, which was the dominant faith for Scots immigrants.
Going into the Civil War, the Episcopal Churchmen of the South largely backed the Confederacy. One Confederate General was an Episcopal Bishop.
The South had always had a fair number of itinerant preachers who were not Episcopal Priest. While the Episcopal Church seemed to be backing the Southern cause during the war, the itinerant preachers were warning of doom and God's judgment. The result of the war seemed to prove them right.
The point is, the Southern cause was corrupt and disgusting from a moral prospective from the onset. Backing corruption, in the end, corrupts.
Bad company corrupts good morals.
This will have a bad end for Evangelicals, and for those of other faiths following the same path. But particularly for Evangelicals. For one thing, they are the only religions denomination that's so heavily invested in Trump. Not other religion, Christian or otherwise, is.
Secondly, the "mainline" Protestant denominations are not only not invested in Trump, they've already sustained their demographic blows by compromising with the leftward drift of culture. That's split them in many instances, and where it has not, people have voted with their feet. The Episcopal Church, for example, once the Church of the economic elite, is in severe trouble.
The Catholic Church, by comparison, has actually remained stable in numbers in the US, but it should be growing. The scandals of the earliest 21st Century served the accidental purpose, however, if making its younger adherants, including clerics, more orthodox and conservative, and more "other". Younger clerics speak as if they're at a last stand, which they really are not, or as if they're the first missionairies into pagan culture. Nobody is looks upon any current political leader as a Catholic standard bearor, most particularly Catholics.
No, it is some of the Evangelical and Culturally Christian Americans who have adopted Trump with zeal, seemingly thinking of him as a sort of Protectant Knights Templar out to do battle.
When he fails, and he will, as this time he will be unrestrained, they will share the failure, and the consequences of it.
Pyotr Alexeevich Romanov, Пётр I Алексеевич, also known as Peter the Great, Czar of all Russia, and them Emperor of All Russia, died at age 52.
He is recalled for having carried out a policy of aggressive Westernization, not all of which stuck (he attempted to introduce the Julian calendar) and expansion that transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire. He regarded the Russian people, his subjects, with some degree of contempt, finding them to be rude primitives. Born into a reign that was closely united with the Russian Orthodox Church, he had an unusual interest in Russian Quakers and Dissenters and held Orthodoxy in some degree of contempt, which showed the degree of his power in that he was able to get away with it.
He was married three times, once to Eudoxia Lopukhina, when he was only 16. She was a wife his mother had found, in the tradition of the Romanov monarchy, He later divorced her, something allowed in the Orthodox faith, and forced her to join a convent, although the couple did have three children before then. He later married Marta Helena Skowrońska, the daughter of a Polish-Lithuanian peasant, whom had been his mistress for some time prior in 1724. She converted from Catholicism in order to marry him. He later married Catherine, who was crowned crowned as Empress. He had a total of fifteen children.
Was he great? Well, probably. He engaged in constant warfare but was a success in expanding the Russian Empire.
Was he admirable, not in my book.
Funny thing about him is that the people for whom he was great, he didn't particularly admire, a trait he shared with Prussian Frederick the Great.
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The German 5th Panzer Army made an attempt to encircle Bastogne. The U.S. 3d Army attacked towards Houffalize.
King George II of Greece proclaimed a regency and appointed Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens to the role.
General Leslie Groves reported that two atomic bombs would be ready for testing by the summer of 1945.
Part I of the Sergei Eisenstein's Russian epic film Ivan the Terrible premiered. Part II would not be released until 1958, as it was banned. Eisenstein died in 1948 and a planned Part III was accordingly never made.
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The reign of Alfonso XII of Spain began following the Pronunciamiento de Sagunto of December 29, 1874, ending the First Spanish Republic.
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A joint session of the U.S. Congress received King Kalakaua, the first joint congressional session to receive a foreign head of state.
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Massachusetts was holding a provincial congress.
King Carlos III of Spain issued a royal order forbidding hunting and fishing in the forest of Balsain, which was reserved for royal amusement.
Sounds familiar.
The news of the election hit the papers.
The former Emperor of China, Puyi, was expelled from the Forbidden City by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who unilaterally revoked the Articles of Favourable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor after His Abdication
Puyi lived a tragic life, having been born into the anachronism of the Chinese Empire at a time it was collapsing. He'd go on to be Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, a prisoner of the Red Chinese, and finally, a gardener. He died in 1967 at age 61.
President Coolidge made a Thanksgiving proclamation:
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The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended as a complete Japanese defeat, effectively ending the Imperial Japanese Navy as a cohesive force. On this day the Japanese lost the cruisers Abukuma, Kinu and Noshiro, destroyers Hayashimo, Nowaki and Uranami and submarine I-26.
Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom, Queen Victoria's youngest child, died at age 87.
Gertrude Tompkins Silver and the P-51D she was flying disappeared in a delivery flight from Los Angeles to Newark, NJ.
Sarah Sundin notes in her blog:
German 20th Mountain Army begins scorched-earth retreat in Finnmark region of northern Norway; 43,000 will be evicted & evacuated, their homes destroyed.
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Éamon de Valera was arrested in Newry as he arrived at a meeting of the Sinn Féin. He was charged with entering a prohibited area under the Civil Powers Act.
Romanian fascist Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu assassinated Constantin Manciu, the police chief of the city of Iași, and shot several other policemen.
He would be acquitted on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense, despite entering the meeting and shooting Manciu from behind.
The British Foreign Office released the Zinoviev letter. The letter purported to be a directive from the Soviets addressed to the Communist Party of Great Britain to increase labor unrest in the UK. A protest was lodged with the Soviet Embassy.
Belgium signed the Geneva Protocol.
Crown Princes Wilhelm of Germany and Rupprecht of Bavaria reconciled.
The Prince of Wales ended his visit to the United States and Canada.
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The first Canadian elections under the Indian Act were held for the Six Nations Band of Indians Council.
And also elections were held for the Norwegian parliament, resulted in a continuation of the coalition government between the Conservatives and the liberal Venstre.
The German National People's Party issued a proclamation announcing itself in favor of restoring the monarchy and terminating the Treaty of Versailles and the Dawes Plan.
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From Reddit's 100 Years Ago Sub:
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Proclamation, October 15, 1924
Purpose: To declare historic landmarks on military reservations as national monuments
CASTLE PINCKNEY, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
The entire area comprising 18.09 acres situated in the city of Saint Augustine, Florida.
Calvin Coolidge.
The Prince of Wales traveled from Detroit to Toronto and participated in a fox hunt.
Toronto was a very English town at the time.
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Ali of Hejaz was proclaimed the King of Hejaz. His predecessor King Hussein bin Ali had fled from Mecca to Jeddah to avoid the conquest of Nejd by the Sultanate of Nejd, led by Ibn Saud.
Atypically for an Arab monarch/chieftain, he was married just once. He had five children. He died in Baghdad in the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq in 1935.
Radio Marconi, the first public radio station in Italy, began broadcasting.
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Governor General of Canada Julian Byng ordered the termination of the Six Nations Confederacy Council and ordered that it be replaced by an elected body.
This followed the Council's attempt to bring its existence to the attention of the League of Nations.
The Six Nations are the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora. They have a large reserve in Ontario.
The Polish Border Protection Corps was established by Poland to protect against Soviet invasion and address bandits crossing the border.
Calvin Coolidge gave an electronic signal from the Oval Office to commences electrical generation from the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project.
Prince Wolfgang of Hesse married Princess Marie Alexandra of Baden over the objections of Wolfgang's uncle, the former German Kaiser Wilhelm II. The couple would have no children.
She died in an American air raid on Frankfurt am Main on January 29-30, 1944. She had been working as an aid worker there. He joined the Nazi Party and was appointed a Landrat (district administrator) of Obertaunuskreis, a landkreis in the state of Hesse. He remarried after the war and died in 1989 at age 92.
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He reigned from 3 May 1814 until 20 March 1815, and then again from 8 July 1815 – 16 September 1824, following the defeat of Napoleon. He was succeeded by Charles X.
He introduced a parliamentary form of government, payed off French indemnity imposed by the Napoleonic Wars, modernized the French Army.
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