The St. Edward’s Sapphire, which was the gem on St. Edward’s ring, survived through Oliver Cromwell’s reign and disassembly of the crown jewels and was recut into its present form for Charles II after the restoration. Queen Victoria had the gem set into the finial cross of the Imperial State Crown. St. Edward, who had great devotion to St. John the Evangelist, was very generous towards his subjects. One day on his way to Westminster Abbey he was accosted by a beggar. The King’s immediate reaction was to search his pockets for some money to hand the beggar. Upon finding his pockets empty the king, without hesitation, slipped the sapphire ring off his finger and presented it to the beggar. The beggar thanked the generous monarch and departed. Many years later, two pilgrims from the Holy Land returned the ring to the king saying they had met St John the Evangelist who told them he had received the ring from the king, many years earlier in the guise of a beggar.
No matter how much the Revolution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates intermediate bodies and the medieval organic monarchies even more.
This is because monarchic absolutism tends to put all subjects, even those of the highest standing, at a level of reciprocal equality in a lower station that foreshadows the annihilation of the individual and the anonymity that have reached their apex in the great urban concentrations of socialist societies.
Among the intermediate groups to be abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vilify it in every way.
There are families in which an artistic sense, the gift of eloquence, the discernment necessary to be a physician, or an aptitude for business, etc., are transmitted through many successive generations.
A Victorian Family at the Seaside by Charles Wynne Nicholls
Nature itself, and therefore, God, who is the Author of nature, by means of the family, from the very beginning ends with the principal of equality.
He who is formed by those more highly gifted from the point of view of talent, culture, manners, or – what is capital – morality, will ever have a more advantageous starting point.
The famous Saint-Cyr boarding house that the Marquise of Maintenon, morganatic wife of Louis XIV, founded to help the numerous young ladies of the aristocracy whose parents had become impoverished.
The only way of avoiding this is to suppress the family, educating all children in egalitarian and state-run schools, according to the communist regime.
The nobility of the lord is passed on to his servant, and the immense kitchen of Windsor Castle, a most authentic kitchen, is indisputably an elevated, noble, and worthy kitchen of a castle. It communicates a degree of royal dignity to the more humble servile activity therein exercised, and gives it a somewhat regal splendor.
Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in the Garden of the Tuileries with Madame Lambale. Painting by Joseph Caraud
In Christian civilization, the grandeur of the lord doesn’t humiliate the servant, but rather elevates him.
