The Anglo-Irish Confessor of King Louis XVI

Today, January 21, is the 224th anniversary of the execution of Louis Capet--as the National Convention called him--King Louis XVI. (In contrast, Charles I had not been deposed when he was executed after the English Civil War in 1649.)

This Eyewitness to History post describes the event. The monarch was attended the night before and the day of his execution by an Anglo-Irish priest, the Abbe Henry Essex Edgeworth, who heard the king's last Confession, celebrated Mass for him, and supported him throughout the ordeal--he is the eyewitness cited in the link above. According to 1878's A Compendium of Irish Biography found on this site, he was a:

cousin of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was born at Edgeworthstown in 1745. His father, Essex Edgeworth, "who took the name of "de Firmont" from a neighbouring hill (Fairy Mount), became a Catholic and emigrated to France when Henry was but six years of age. The lad was educated for the priesthood at the Sorbonne, and after ordination became distinguished among the Parisian clergy for his talents and piety. In 1789 he was appointed confessor to Madame Elizabeth, and was justly esteemed the friend and adviser of the royal family. When Louis XVI. was condemned to the guillotine, he sent for the Abbe Edgeworth, then in concealment at Choisy, who immediately repaired to his master. The Abbe attended the unfortunate King to the scaffold, 21st January 1793, and has left a minute account of the execution. He makes no mention of the exclamation usually attributed to him as the knife fell — "Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven!" After encountering many dangers, he escaped to England in 1796, where he is stated to have declined a pension offered him by Pitt. He afterwards joined Louis XVIII. at Blankenburg, and accompanied him to Mittau. He was from time to time intrusted with several important missions for the Bourbons. He fell a victim to a virulent fever, caught in his ministrations amongst French prisoners of war at Mittau, and died 22nd May 1807, aged about 62. In his last moments he was attended by the Princess, daughter of Louis XVI.; the exiled French royal family went into mourning, and Louis XVIII. composed his epitaph.

Note that Elena Maria Vidal includes the scene of Madame Royale visiting the Abbe on his deathbed in her novel about the Princess Marie-Therese, Louis and Marie Antoinette's only child to survive the French Revolution, and her incredible life. The author provided this excerpt on her blog in 2010:

The town of Mitau was bright with snow in the sunshine of a May morning, and cold winds whipped around the little palace which His Imperial Majesty the Tsar of All the Russias had generously loaned to the impoverished, exiled Bourbons. In a small, sparsely furnished room of the palace, an aged priest lay dying. In a chair beside his bed sat a young woman, not quite thirty, in a maroon, high-waisted wool dress, with a white linen apron. Under a close fitting white cap, her amber-colored hair, in a grecian knot, framed a strong, solemn face with piercing blue-gray eyes. Dipping a cloth into a basin of water, she sponged the forehead of the sick man, whose chest shuddered and heaved. At first glance, no one would guess that she was Madame Royale, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, their Mousseline la sérieuse, now the Duchesse d’Angoulême. With closer examination, no one with her dignified, albeit rather stiff bearing could be anything but a princess. She radiated a cold majesty to those who did not know her, but in her eyes burned the fires of deep emotions; her frigid manner was from sadness, not apathy or scorn.

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the Edgeworth family moved to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I and the Abbe's father became a Catholic during the reign of King George II. Edgeworth was offered an Irish diocese after his ordination but noted that England was a distant second language to him since he was raised in France from childhood. When Le Clerc, the Archbishop of Paris, fled in 1792, he appointed Edgeworth as the Vicar General of the diocese, and the Holy See never recognized Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, who had taken the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (who ended up on the guillotine just like Louis XVI--on April 13, 1794).

Crime, Torture and Punishment in the 16th Century

Peter Marshall reviews this new book on torture and execution as practiced in Nuremburg, Germany for the Literary Review:

This is a marvellous book about a fascinating subject. It is, in a sense, a portrait of a serial killer. Frantz Schmidt was employed between 1578 and 1618 as the official executioner (and torturer) of the prosperous German city of Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he personally despatched 394 people, and flogged, branded or otherwise maimed many hundreds more. His life is also a tale of honour, duty and a lasting quest for meaning and redemption.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of 'nips' (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows.

This gruesome regimen can be reconstructed because, over the course of 45 years, Schmidt kept a personal journal - not a diary in anything like the modern sense, but a usually terse and impersonal chronological record of all the punishments he had inflicted, including some details of the crimes behind them. The journal is not a new discovery (a version of it was printed as long ago as 1801), but Joel Harrington, drawing on a previously unused, near-contemporary copy, is the first historian to realise its full potential. The source lends itself to a social history of crime and punishment, but Harrington also attempts something more interesting and ambitious: to enter imaginatively into the world-view of its compiler and construct a rounded portrait of a personality and a life. Cleverly, he weaves Schmidt's own words wherever possible into his historical narrative, placing them in italics to let us identify what he has reported and what the author has conjectured or imaginatively inferred (invariably pitched pleasingly between excessive caution and undue presumption). It is a virtuoso performance. Harrington is able to draw on a range of ancillary documents, but this is the best example of making a single, apparently unpromising historical source sing since Eamon Duffy breathed life into a set of dusty English churchwardens' accounts in The Voices of Morebath.

Macmillan, the U.S. publisher, provides some excerpts and other material here. A couple of years ago, I corresponded with Professor Frank W. Barlow of Mount Holyoke College, who is at work on a biography of Richard Topcliffe. I really doubt that Topcliffe would have kept such an impersonal journal of his work of pursuing and torturing Catholic priests. From all that I've read of Topcliffe he took personal satisfaction in capturing priests like St. Robert Southwell and may have even enjoyed inflicting pain.

The End of a Rebellion

James Scott, the First Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's favorite illegitimate son, was executed on July 15, 1685. He had been captured after his defeat at the Battle of Sedgmoor, as he was leading the first of many Stuart attempts to take the throne after Charles II died. (Only one succeeded, of course: William of Orange's invasion on November 5, 1688.)

He had been the prime candidate for succession to the throne for the Whigs in the Exclusionist Crisis of 1679. After the fraud of the Popish Plot had been discovered, the real Rye House Plot of 1683 to assassinate both Charles II and James, the Duke of York forced Monmouth to leave England. When his father died, Monmouth invaded to wrest the crown from Catholic James II, landing at Lyme Regis and proclaiming himself "James II". After his capture, he was Attainted a traitor by Parliament and set for execution.

Unfortunately, executioners in England weren't what they had been. The Tudor monarchs had kept them in good practice and even knew where to get specialists for certain jobs (e.g., the swordsman from Calais for Anne Boleyn)--although there had been some shortages at times of practiced axemen because of issues of supply and demand (e.g., the inept execution of Blessed Margaret Pole at the Tower when there was so much to do in the north of England in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace). Jack Ketch was singularly inept and might have taken as many as EIGHT blows to sever Monmouth's head--the official count is FIVE. Poor Monmouth suffered horribly and his cries of agony were terrifying. Guards had to protect Ketch after the execution as the crowds were so enraged. And this after Monmouth had paid him in gold to do a good job, reminding him of the very bad job he'd done on Lord Russell after the Rye House Plot. Perhaps that reminder made him nervous.

Ketch was replaced as executioner for a time but recalled when his successor was hanged. (Gallows humor, anyone?)

James Scott was married, but following his father's example, was not faithful to his wife. Anne Scott, a wealthy Scottish heiress and he were married in 1663 and had eight children, four of whom survived infancy. His widow remarried: Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis. Monmouth also had children with his mistress, Eleanor Needham. In John Dryden's satiric and allegorical poem Absalom and Achitophel, Monmouth is Absalom, Charles II is King David, and Lord Shaftesbury, leader of the Exclusionist Whigs, is Achitophel.

Another important aspect of this story is that James II's army had many Roman Catholic officers. As he began his efforts to extend not just toleration but freedom of religion in England through his Declaration of Indulgence, James referenced the loyalty of these Catholic soldiers. He argued that their service should not be rewarded by the Test Act which would require their loss of rank and pay.