Monday 4 February 2013

By the King of France...

A little something from across the Channel from the Year of Grace 1648.

4 comments:

  1. Speaking of King Charles the Martyr, do you happen to know a good edition of the Eikon Basilike? I've been wanting to read it, but I can only find a version that is 'enriched' with Eikonoklastes.

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  2. I'm afraid I don't. In all honesty I have never read it myself, though I have read a few quotes in Anglican devotional books by James VI and I.

    It was on the death of St Charles the Martyr that France cut off all trade with England. In Russia the Tsar was outraged at what had been done and ordered all English merchants out of Russia.

    And yet there are people to-day who set St Charles' death at naught, as though it didn't matter. Unbelievable!

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  3. And those who do think it mattered see it as a 'victory of the people' over a bad, incompetent monarch. Even the handbook we used at our university (Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History) points the finger either entirely or largely to 'ineptitude' of King Charles and Archbishop Laud. To its credit, it does acknowledge the impopularity of Cromwell's regime. The lectures just put the civil war as a precursor to the French Revolution.

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  4. Saint Charles the Martyr, as well as his enemies, was perfectly conscious that the loss of the true concept and meaning of Royal Sovereignty would affect the way of understanding not only temporal power, but spiritual power equally. He, the bishop of external and temporal things, was the first wall against the enemies of apostolic episcopate, on wich lays the foundations of the whole church.

    Now that both episcopacies have been nearly totally subverted, we are sure that Our Lord will intervene to restaure in their proper self these powers without wich we will never be able to be liberated from the babylonian captivity we are in.

    May he pray for the return of our legitimate kings and bishops!

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