The State Opening of the States-General of the Netherlands

The third Tuesday in September beholds Prinsjesdag — the Day of the Princes — when the Queen of the Netherlands formally opens the annual parliamentary session of the States-General. Queen Beatrix arrives at the Ridderzaal (Knight’s Hall) of the Binnehof palace in the center of The Hague by means of the Gouden Koets (Golden Coach) presented to her predecessor Wilhelmina by the grateful burgers of the city of Amsterdam.

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Benedict XVI brings a message of love & hope to the City of Light

It is wholly appropriate that the motto of the city of Paris is Fluctuat nec mergitur: “Tossed by waves, she does not sink”. It would be hard to find better words to describe the Barque of Peter, whose Holy Father the Pope has spent the past two days in the French capital. From time immemorial, France has been described as “the eldest daughter of the Church”, its primatial see of Lyons established in the second century and Clovis, its first Christian king, receiving baptism in 498. But alongside the 1,500 years of Christianity, France has, for the past two centuries, also been a font of revolution and disruption — the very spirit of that first “non serviam“.

It was the French thinker Charles Maurras — not himself a Catholic until the very end of his life — who conceived of the notion that (since the Revolution) there was not one France but two: le pays réel and le pays legal; The real France, Catholic and true, versus the official France, irreligious and contrived. Just as Maurras differentiated the two visions of France, we in the English-speaking world know that England is truly a Catholic country that is suffering from a four-century interregnum (and so with Scotland, and Ireland, and America, and Canada, and Australia…). We love our homes but we know they are not truly themselves — they do not truly reflect that idea of their essence — until they enjoy the fullness of Christian communion.

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The Daily Telegraph — 6 September 2008
At 18 he left home to walk the length of Europe; at 25, as an SOE agent, he kidnapped the German commander of Crete; now at 93, Patrick Leigh Fermor, arguably the greatest living travel writer, is publishing the nearest he may come to an autobiography – and finally learning to type. William Dalrymple meets him at home in Greece

‘You’ve got to bellow a bit,’ Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor said, inclining his face in my direction, and cupping his ear. ‘He’s become an economist? Well, thank God for that. I thought you said he’d become a Communist.’

He took a swig of retsina and returned to his lemon chicken.

‘I’m deaf,’ he continued. ‘That’s the awful truth. That’s why I’m leaning towards you in this rather eerie fashion. I do have a hearing aid, but when I go swimming I always forget about it until I’m two strokes out, and then it starts singing at me. I get out and suck it, and with luck all is well. But both of them have gone now, and that’s one reason why I am off to London next week. Glasses, too. Running out of those very quickly. Occasionally, the one that is lost is found, but their numbers slowly diminish…’

He trailed off. ‘The amount that can go wrong at this age – you’ve no idea. This year I’ve acquired something called tunnel vision. Very odd, and sometimes quite interesting. When I look at someone I can see four eyes, one of them huge and stuck to the side of the mouth. Everyone starts looking a bit like a Picasso painting.’

He paused and considered for a moment, as if confronted by the condition for the first time. ‘And, to be honest, my memory is not in very good shape either. Anything like a date or a proper name just takes wing, and quite often never comes back. Winston Churchill – couldn’t remember his name last week.

‘Even swimming is a bit of a trial now,’ he continued, ‘thanks to this bloody clock thing they’ve put in me – what d’they call it? A pacemaker. It doesn’t mind the swimming. But it doesn’t like the steps on the way down. Terrific nuisance.’

We were sitting eating supper in the moonlight in the arcaded L-shaped cloister that forms the core of Leigh Fermor’s beautiful house in Mani in southern Greece. Since the death of his beloved wife Joan in 2003, Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Leigh Fermor, has lived here alone in his own Elysium with only an ever-growing clowder of darting, mewing, paw-licking cats for company. He is cooked for and looked after by his housekeeper, Elpida, the daughter of the inn-keeper who was his original landlord when he came to Mani for the first time in 1962.

It is the most perfect writer’s house imaginable, designed and partially built by Leigh Fermor himself in an old olive grove overlooking a secluded Mediterranean bay. It is easy to see why, despite growing visibly frailer, he would never want to leave. Buttressed by the old retaining walls of the olive terraces, the whitewashed rooms are cool and airy and lined with books; old copies of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books lie scattered around on tables between Attic vases, Indian sculptures and bottles of local ouzo.

A study filled with reference books and old photographs lies across a shady courtyard. There are cicadas grinding in the cypresses, and a wonderful view of the peaks of the Taygetus falling down to the blue waters of the Aegean, which are so clear it is said that in some places you can still see the wrecks of Ottoman galleys lying on the seabed far below.

There is a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; and from below comes the crash of the sea on the pebbles of the foreshore. Yet there is something unmistakably melancholy in the air: a great traveller even partially immobilised is as sad a sight as an artist with failing vision or a composer grown hard of hearing.

I had driven down from Athens that morning, through slopes of olives charred and blackened by last year’s forest fires. I arrived at Kardamyli late in the evening. Although the area is now almost metropolitan in feel compared to what it was when Leigh Fermor moved here in the 1960s (at that time he had to move the honey-coloured Taygetus stone for his house to its site by mule as there was no road) it still feels wonderfully remote and almost untouched by the modern world.

When Leigh Fermor first arrived in Mani in 1962 he was known principally as a dashing commando. At the age of 25, as a young agent of Special Operations Executive (SOE), he had kidnapped the German commander in Crete, General Kreipe, and returned home to a Distinguished Service Order and movie version of his exploits, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) with Dirk Bogarde playing him as a handsome black-shirted guerrilla.

It was in this house that Leigh Fermor made the startling transformation – unique in his generation – from war hero to literary genius. To meet, Leigh Fermor may still have the speech patterns and formal manners of a British officer of a previous generation; but on the page he is a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly a single living equal.

It was here in the isolation and beauty of Kardamyli that Leigh Fermor developed his sublime prose style, and here that he wrote most of the books that have made him widely regarded as the world’s greatest travel writer, as well as arguably our finest living prose-poet. While his densely literary and cadent prose style is beyond imitation, his books have become sacred texts for several generations of British writers of non-fiction, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane and Rory Stewart, all of whom have been inspired by the persona he created of the bookish wanderer: the footloose scholar in the wilds, scrambling through remote mountains, a knapsack full of books on his shoulder.

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What is this cartographic madness? Hanover part of the Netherlands? Kassel ruled by France? Nuremburg part of a Bohemia that reaches to the Frankfurt suburbs? Hamburg in Denmark? Regensburg on the Austro-Czech border? I came across the company Kalimedia in an article from Die Zeit a month or two ago and discovered their map of a Europe without a Germany. Believe it or not, there were plans of one sort or another to achieve similar results at the end of the Second World War. The major plan for the dissection of Germany was merely a creation of Nazi propaganda, and while the vaguely similar Morgenthau Plan did exist, it was soon shelved once its impracticality became obvious.

The Bakker-Schut Plan, meanwhile, was a Dutch proposal for the annexation of several German towns, and perhaps even a number of German cities. German natives would be expelled, except for those who spoke the Low Franconian dialect, who would be forcibly dutchified. They even came up with a list of new Dutch names for German cities: c.f. the post at Strange Maps on “Eastland, Our Land: Dutch Dreams of Expansion at Germany’s Expense”.

This news photo showing a protest (what else?) of bus drivers on the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires gives a good view of the capital’s city hall. The municipal headquarters is located between the Plaza de Mayo and the former home of the newspaper La Prensa; the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace (officially called Government House, Casa del Gobierno) can be seen in the distance at the end of the square.

I’ve long thought they should reduce the auto space by two lanes, one on each side, and double the width of the sidewalks — but that would probably make the bus drivers even more irate.

Pieter Brueghel II, The Bad Shepherd
Oil on panel, 29 in. x 41¼ in.
c. 1616, Private collection

With an original estimate of £1,000,000–£1,500,000, Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Bad Shepherd sold at a final hammer price of £2,505,250 at Christie’s in London this July. As the house lot notes state, it is “one of the most original and visually arresting of all images within the Brueghelian corpus of paintings”.

There is something arrestingly modern about this painting that fascinates me.

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Gerald Warner reports on the funeral of David Lumsden of Cushnie:

Thursday, September 11, 2008
To Edinburgh yesterday, for a melancholy but magnificent and uplifting occasion: the funeral of David Lumsden of Cushnie, Garioch Pursuivant of Arms, restorer of ancient castles and Jacobite romantic. It was held in the Catholic cathedral where, for the first time since Vatican II, the Latin Tridentine Mass was sung, thanks to the permissive rules of Benedict XVI in his motuproprio Summorum Pontificum.

The coffin was draped in the banners of the Order of Malta and the deceased’s arms, with an heraldic hatchment and the decorations of the orders of chivalry to which he belonged. Knights of Malta and of the Constantinian Order processed behind their banner in mediaeval robes. The congregation was filled with peers, chieftains, lairds and splendid eccentrics, the pews awash with tartan. One of the tail-coated ushers was the grandson of a papal marquis. Robin Angus, whose day job is venture capitalist, dressed in the uniform of a papal Knight of St Sylvester, delivered a moving panegyric.

This occasion was a potent reminder of an alternative Scotland, a different pulse from the vulgar, mean-minded, politically correct clones in the abysmal Scottish parliament at Holyrood. It was shamelessly feudal, aristocratic and colourful. Evelyn Waugh would have loved it; Harriet Harridan would have burst her stays. It was reminiscent of the scene in Waugh’s Sword of Honour when, at the funeral of old Mr Crouchback, the members of ancient Catholic Recusant families murmur their sonorous names while the narrator, parodying a wartime poster, concludes: “Their journey was really necessary.”

At the subsequent reception, Lady Mar, whose personal herald David was and who came top of the ballot for the 92 surviving hereditary peers in the House of Lords, was pointedly addressed by Jacobites as “Your Grace”. This was because, although the British state recognises her as 30th Countess of Mar, her ancestor who led the Jacobite Rising of 1715 was created Duke of Mar by the exiled Stuart King James VIII.

Only a few of these Jacobite peerages created by the Stuarts in exile have heirs today. Now that such hereditary peerages no longer bestow an automatic seat in Parliament, it would be a gracious gesture for the Crown to recognise them and so heal old historical wounds. There is a precedent: Spain has recognised the titles of nobility created by the Carlist claimants in exile – Carlism being the Spanish equivalent of Jacobitism.

The dry-as-dust forms issued by government departments are normally very boring; but the most romantic document available online is issued by the Spanish Ministry of Justice, entitled Solicitud de Titulo Nobiliario por: Rehabilitacion/Reconocimiento de Titulo Carlista. It is the formal application for recognition of a title of nobility conferred by the Carlist kings in exile from 1833 to 1936. David Lumsden of Cushnie (RIP) would have appreciated it.

The chapel of the Community of St. Jean’s novitiate at Saint-Jodard in France was tragically consumed by an accidental fire late last month. The brothers give thanks that no one was harmed in the fire and look upon the event as “a favorable occasion to learn how to live together in the Great Hope and to redouble fraternal charity”.

Contributions can be sent to:

The Palace has released this YouTube video on the ancient practice of swan upping.

Francis Luis Mora, Subway riders, New York City, 1914
Print, 12½” x 9¼”
1914, New York Public Library

Quentin Bryce was yesterday sworn in as the Queen of Australia’s representative in her kingdom spanning that southerly continent.

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Center-right New York daily will cease printing at end of month

In a devastating blow to the intellectual life of the city, the New York Sun editor Seth Lipsky announced today that the small-but-influential daily newspaper will cease operations at the end of the month unless new investors can be found to put many millions of dollar into the revived title. The newspaper — known for its excellent arts & cultural coverage and willingness to lift the veil on corruption in addition to its hardcore neoconservative politics — is believed to be operating at a loss of tens of millions of dollars a year. Seth Lipsky announced the perilous state of the Sun in a letter to readers this morning:

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Nils Olav and the King of Norway’s Guards

The King of Norway’s Guards is the household regiment of that Scandinavian sovereign, but their honorary colonel resides in Edinburgh, where the regimental band often performs in the famous Military Tattoo held each summer. This year, the Colonel was honored with no less than a knighthood and took the opportunity of the unit’s presence in Edinburgh to inspect the regiment. Ordinarily, this would be an unremarkable event were it not for the fact that the Colonel is Nils Olav, a penguin currently in residence at the Edinburgh Zoo.

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Behind the Cathedral of St. Louis, New Orleans.

Yann Baly writes:

“Regarding the sacrifice of the 10 young French soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan, we have heard many voices, including those of the families of the young parachutists, saying that they died for nothing.

“Politicians are duty-bound to question the timeliness of our engagement in Afghanistan under NATO command, in a war desired by the United States. We cannot remain silent when France, and French youth have, in the past, paid too heavy a price because of “sacred” unions in wars that diplomacy and sensible politics could have avoided.

“Yesterday, in the majestic courtyard of les Invalides, the French people were able to recall that certain political errors are paid for in blood. It is therefore legitimate to wonder if Jacques Chirac (who was not present yesterday) and Lionel Jospin were right to send the French army into Afghanistan in 2001 and if Nicolas Sarkozy was not wrong to reenforce the contingent with the inadequate means we are all aware of. As Bernard Antony has reminded us, the United States has committed so many errors of foreign policy, so many criminal mistakes in its diplomatic and military actions, that one can doubt the need to be present in Afghanistan. History shows us that economic and oil interests have often been a decisive element in the American involvement in military conflicts. Fight efficiently against terrorism? There too, there are questions to be asked.

“Nonetheless, it is false to say that our young parachutists died for nothing. First of all, the French people have become conscious once again that they had an army. A month and a half after the tragedy in Carcassonne, the blood of these soldiers has washed away the lies, insults and spite, some of it coming from the head of State himself, heaped on the French army. But most of all, in our society where egoism and individualism are the rule, for a people who seem to have forgotten the meaning of sacrifice, their death in combat, at the age of 20 for most of them, is no doubt a sign of an imminent resurrection of the spirit of French resistance. In the current international and national context, this dimension is not insignificant. France, like the rest of the world, is entering into a period of uncertainties and grave risks. To be conscious of that and to prepare for it is not nothing.”

Garioch Pursuivant of Arms, sometime Baron of Cushnie-Lumsden, Knight of Malta, Patron of the Aboyne Highland Games

It was with great sadness that I learned this morning of the death of David Lumsden. He was an exceptionally genial and affable man, and was relied on to provide good company at many events, from balls to Sunday lunches and everything in between. But David was generous not only with his good company but with his patronage, as is attested to by the countless organizations he helped and guided. Here was a man who was generous of spirit. David’s death came very suddenly yesterday afternoon in his hotel room at the annual conference of the 1745 Association, of which he was president. Just last Sunday he had attended the traditional Mass at St. Andrew’s, Ravelston in Edinburgh, where a friend described him as “looking as hale and hearty as ever”.

David Gordon Allen d’Aldecamb Lumsden of Cushnie, sometime Baron of Cushnie-Lumsden, was born on 25 May in 1933 in Quetta, Baluchistan in the Empire of India. He was the son of Henry Gordon Strange Lumsden, a Major in the Royal Scots, of Nocton Hall, Lincolnshire and Sydney Mary, only child of Brigadier-General Charles Allen Elliot.

He was educated at Allhallows, Devon, Bedford School, and at Jesus College, Cambridge before serving in the Territorial Army with the London Scottish while working at British American Tobacco. He was a Knight of the Order of Malta, as well as of the Constantinian Order, and was Patron of the Aboyne Highland Games. David enthusiastically served as Garioch Pursuivant to the Chief of the Name and Arms of Mar (presently Margaret of Mar, the 30th Countess of Mar), one of the four surviving private officers of arms in Scotland recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon.

Lumsden with friends, at the Aboyne Highland Games.

David co-founded the Castles of Scotland Preservation Trust and the Scottish Historic Organs Trust and was President of the Scottish Military History Society. In addition to his Magister Artium from Cambridge, he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He was on the council of The Admiral the Viscount Keppel Association and was one of the patrons of the famous Russian Summer Ball in London. He was Convenor of the Monarchist League of Scotland and was on the council of the Royal Stuart Society.

In the realm of sport, he was a keen shot and had rowed at Cambridge, in addition to his interest in sailing and riding.

Left: Representing the Royal Stuart Society at the Henry IX commemoration at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Right: In his capacity as Garioch Pursuivant of Arms, at the XXVIIth International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in 2006.

David had a passion for architecture, and especially that of his native Scotland. Returning in 1970 after a spell in Africa, he undertook the restoration of two family properties: Cushnie House, built in 1688 by Alexander Lumsden and Tillycairn Castle, built in 1540 by Matthew Lumsden. He later went on to restore Leithen Lodge at Innerleithen, an 1880s shooting lodge built in a distinctly Scottish take on the Arts & Crafts tradition. Under the auspices of the Castles of Scotland Preservation Trust, in 1994 he oversaw the restoration of Liberton Tower just south of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.

“David was a unique man possessed of an insatiable love of life and learning,” his friend Rafe Heydel-Mankoo said. “He will be deeply missed and fondly remembered by those fortunate enough to have met him.”

“David was at the centre of so many things, and brought together so many different people,” said Lorna Angus, the wife of Robin Angus. “He could bring life to any gathering and he made so many good things possible.”

Robin Angus, meanwhile, said that David Lumsden “personified a world of precious things — things which are imperilled, but which never seemed imperilled when he was there.”

“David no longer visibly with us is unimaginable,” Robin continued. “What his friends must now do is keep the flame, and — as he did — pass it on to others with the same generous wisdom. He was the soul of old Scotland. I hope that, in Heaven, Raeburn will make amends for what the centuries did not allow, and paint his portrait.”

While I wholeheartedly agree with Robin, it must be said that those who were blessed to know David are left with a portrait of him in our hearts and minds far greater than even the brush of Raeburn could achieve.

David Gordon Allen d’Aldecamb Lumsden
of Cushnie

1933–2008

“… hold fast to that which is good.”
— 1.Thess 5:21

Requiem aeternum dona eis Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Requiescat in pace.

Look at this majestic avenue of trees on the Kingston Lacy estate in deepest dearest Dorset. The allee was planted by the art collector, architect, Egyptologist, MP, and adventurer William John Bankes, inheritor of the estate, as a gift for his mother. There are 365 trees on one side and 366 on the other, symbolizing a regular year and a leap year. The estate is now owned by National Trust, which has decided, to the protests of old tree experts (which is to say, experts on the subject of old trees), that twenty-one of them will have to be savagely cut down on the grounds of “health and safety”.

“We don’t want to fell these trees but we have a duty,” says a spokesman for the estate. “It’s a very busy B-road and the trees are only metres from the road. We’re following good Health and Safety practice.” Pity the poor fool, and weep for the beeches of Kingston Lacy.

First Christian de Lisle, now Jennifer Roche: at this rate within a year everyone I know will have contributed to the Catholic Herald! (And, incidentally, I did have a brief chat in the Travellers Club once with the chap who wrote the piece on the Assumption).

I might just have to take out a subscription, though an electronic one — probably the most convenient for we across the seas — is still a hefty £38: at today’s exchange rate that’s seventy good ole American smackeroons! Probably worth it, though.

The 122nd Exhibition of the Sociedad Rural Argentina

One of the highlights of the Argentina calendar is the Rural Exposition or “La Rural” which takes place every year at the Buenos Aires showgrounds of the Sociedad Rural Argentina. La Rural is one of the few events which takes up the entirety of the Society’s thirty-acre home nudged between Palermo Viejo and Palermo Nuevo and facing onto the Plaza Italia. Lasting from July 24 to August 4, with admission just 13 pesos (about $4.25 or £2.30), the show usually attracts a million visitors over its thirteen days.

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What with all this democracy things will never be the same

The Union Club

By Cleveland Amory
American Heritage, December 1954, Vol. 6, Issue 1

In 1936 in New York City there occurred the 100th anniversary of the Union Club, oldest and most socially sacrosanct of New York’s gentlemen’s clubs. From all parts of this country and even from abroad there arrived, from lesser clubs, congratulatory messages, impressive gifts and particularly large offerings of floral tributes.

At the actual anniversary banquet, however, as so often happens in gentlemen’s clubs, there was, despite the dignity of the occasion, the severe speeches and the general sentimental atmosphere, a little over-drinking. And one member over-drank a little more than a little. Shortly before dessert he decided he had had enough, at least of the food, and he disappeared. Furthermore, he did not reappear.

Worried, some friends of his decided, after the banquet, to conduct a search. The faithful doorman in the hooded hallporter’s chair gave the news that no gentleman of that description had passed out, or rather by, him, and the friends redoubled their efforts. High and low they combed the missing member’s favorite haunts—the bar, the lounge, the card room, the billiard room, the locker room, the steam room, etc. One even tried, on an off-chance, the library. There, as usual, there was nothing but a seniority list of the Union’s ten oldest living members and a huge sign reading “SILENCE.”

Finally, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, they found the gentleman. He was lying on a bed, stretched out full length in his faultless white tie and tails, dead to this world.

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