The Past is Already Written

“There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

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Chocolate (JTBC, 2019-2020) 💕

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SAINT OF THE DAY (July 19)

St. Arsenius, an Anchorite, was born in 354 at Rome and died in 450 at Troe in Egypt.

Theodosius the Great, having requested Emperor Gratian and Pope Damasus to find him in the West a tutor for his son Arcadius, decided on Arsenius, a man well read in Greek literature, a member of a noble Roman family, and said to have been a deacon of the Roman Church.

Upon receving the request to become the tutor of young Arcadius, he left and reached Constantinople in 383.

He continued as tutor in the imperial family for eleven years, during the last three of which he also had charge of his pupil's brother Honorius.

Coming one day to see his children at their studies, Theodosius found them sitting while Arsenius talked to them standing.

This he would not tolerate, and he ordered the teacher to sit while the pupils to stood.

Upon his arrival at court, Arsenius had been given a splendid establishment, and probably because the Emperor so desired, he lived a very great lifestyle, but all the time felt a growing inclination to renounce the world.

After praying for a long time to be enlightened as to what he should do, he heard a voice saying, "Arsenius, flee the company of men, and thou shalt be saved."

Thereupon he embarked secretly for Alexandria, and hastening to the desert of Scetis, asked to be admitted among the solitaries who dwelt there.

St. John the Dwarf, to whose cell he was conducted, though previously warned of the quality of his visitor, took no notice of him and left him standing by himself, while he invited the rest to sit down at table.

When John was half finished with his meal, he threw down some bread before Arsenius, bidding him with an air of indifference to eat if he would.

Arsenius meekly picked up the bread and ate, sitting on the ground. Satisfied with this proof of humility, St. John kept him under his direction.

The new solitary was from the beginning most exemplary, yet unwittingly retained some of his old habits, such as sitting cross-legged or laying one foot over the other. 

Noticing this, the abbot requested some one to imitate Arsenius's posture at the next gathering of the brethren, and upon his doing so, forthwith rebuked him publicly.

Arsenius took the hint and corrected himself.

During the fifty-five years of his solitary life, he was always the most meanly clad of all, thus punishing himself for his former seeming vanity in the world.

In like manner, to atone for having used perfumes at court, he never changed the water in which he moistened the palm leaves of which he made mats but only poured in fresh water upon it as it wasted, thus letting it become stenchy in the extreme.

Even while engaged in manual labour, he never relaxed in his application to prayer. At all times, copious tears of devotion fell from his eyes.

But what distinguished him the most was his disinclination to all that might interrupt his union with God.

When, after a long period of searching, his place of retreat was discovered, he not only refused to return to court and act as adviser to his former pupil, Emperor Arcadius, but he would not even be his almoner to the poor and the monasteries of the neighbourhood.

He invariably denied himself to visitors, no matter what their rank and condition and left to his disciples the care of entertaining them.

His contemporaries so greatly admired him because of this, that they gave him the surname "the Great."

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UK’s Princess Anne was guided a tour on the collection of ceremonial chariots, which are under renovation ahead of being used for the funerals, and also the displays of British-related artefacts at the National Museum.

The Princess also boarded a Royal Thai Navy Vessel at Ratchaworadit Pier touring along Chao Phraya River Bangkok on her official visit to Thailand.

Princess Anne attended the launching of the ASEAN-UK Health Security Partnership funded programme and observed the laboratory work at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit — Faculty of Tropical Medicine Bangkok on her official visit to Thailand.

Princess Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence attended a Royal Variety Performance by traditional Thai-UK musicians, as well as inaugural performance of the theatre play “The King’s Command,” written by King Vajiravudh, at the National Theatre Bangkok, on her official visit to Thailand.

📸 Jordan Pettitt / @ukinthailand via X

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SAINT OF THE DAY (July 18)

St. Elizabeth of Schonau was a Benedictine visionary, who had the gift of prophecy. She also suffered the assaults of demonic forces.

Elizabeth was born around 1126 in Bonn, Germany. She was raised and educated in a Benedictine monastery near her birthplace from the age of 12.

Elizabeth came to see the monastery as home, and she took vows in 1147.

With the help of her brother Egbert, a monk and abbot, she wrote three volumes describing her visions.

In 1152, Elizabeth began to experience ecstatic visions of various kinds. This was "a year after Hildegard of Bingen published her first book of visions, the Scivias, a work which seems to have influenced Elizabeth."

These visions generally occurred on Sundays and Holy Days at Mass or Divine Office or after hearing or reading the lives of saints.

Christ, the Virgin Mary, an angel, or the special saint of the day would appear to her and instruct her, or she would see quite realistic representations of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, or other scenes of the Old and New Testaments.

She also had a vision in which she saw the virgin emerging with the sun surrounding her on all sides, and the virgin's great brilliance seemed to illuminate the entire earth.

Along with the great brilliance that emanated from the virgin, a dark cloud appeared, which she described as "extremely dark and horrible to see."

She asked the holy Angel of God, who often appeared to her during visions, what the latter vision meant.

The Angel said that the virgin in the vision she saw is the humanity of the Lord Jesus.

The Angel went on to explain that the darkness represents God's anger with the world, but that the brightness signifies that he has not altogether stopped watching over the earth.

Elizabeth served as the abbess at Schonau from 1157 until her death on 18 June 1164.

She was never formally canonized but was added to the list of saints due to great popular devotion.

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Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge

The "Unmarriageable" Princess who Became Queen Elizabeth II's Ancestor

Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge was born on 27 November 1833 in Hanover, Germany. She was the daughter of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, the seventh son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, making her a first cousin of Queen Victoria.

Although she belonged to one of Britain's highest-ranking royal families, her life did not follow the fairy-tale path expected of a princess.

From a young age, Mary Adelaide became known for her warm personality. She was friendly, generous, approachable, and deeply religious.

At a time when many royals kept their distance from ordinary people, she regularly visited hospitals, schools, orphanages, and charities.

She became one of the first members of the British royal family to actively support a wide range of charitable causes, earning genuine affection from the public.

Despite her popularity, life at court was often difficult. Mary Adelaide was overweight in an era when royal brides were expected to be slim and conventionally beautiful.

Courtiers cruelly nicknamed her "Fat Mary," and many eligible princes refused to marry her. Her modest dowry also made her a less attractive match.

By the time she reached her early thirties, she was still unmarried, something widely viewed as a personal failure for a royal woman in Victorian society.

In 1866, everything changed. The Prince and Princess of Wales (Prince Edward and Alexandra of Denmark) arranged for her to meet Prince Francis of Teck, a handsome officer serving in the Austrian army.

Francis was of royal blood but had been born from a morganatic marriage, meaning his parents' unequal marriage prevented him from inheriting succession rights to the throne of Württemberg.

Although his rank was lower than Mary Adelaide's, he was well known at the Austrian court as "Der schöne Uhlan" ("The Handsome Cavalry Officer").

They met on 7 March 1866, fell in love almost immediately, became engaged within a month, and married on 12 June 1866.

The couple settled in Britain and had four children: Victoria Mary ("May"), Adolphus, Francis, and Alexander.

Their eldest daughter, Victoria Mary, would become one of the most important royal figures of the twentieth century. After the death of her first fiancé, Prince Albert Victor, she married his brother, the future King George V, and became Queen Mary.

Through Queen Mary, Mary Adelaide became the grandmother of King Edward VIII and King George VI.

After Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, George VI became king.

His eldest daughter succeeded him in 1952 as Queen Elizabeth II, making Mary Adelaide the direct ancestress of Britain's modern royal family.

Today, King Charles III is also one of her descendants.

Although Mary Adelaide struggled with debt later in life and even spent time living abroad to escape her creditors, she remained devoted to charity and public service.

She continued supporting hospitals, churches, and charitable organizations until her death on 27 October 1897, aged 63.

Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge (Mary Adelaide Wilhelmina Elizabeth; 27 November 1833 – 27 October 1897), later known as the Duchess of Teck, was a member of the British royal family.

She was one of the first royals to patronise a wide range of charities and was a first cousin of Queen Victoria.

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Francis, Duke of Teck (Francis Paul Charles Louis Alexander; 28 August 1837 – 21 January 1900), known as Count Francis von Hohenstein until 1863, was an Austrian-born nobleman who married into the British royal family.

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Lady Margaret Beaufort

She never wore England's crown. Yet without her, the Tudor dynasty would never have existed.

When people think of the Tudors, they picture Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, or Elizabeth I.

But long before any of them changed history, one determined woman fought a battle that lasted almost her entire life.

Her name was Lady Margaret Beaufort, and she became the architect of a royal dynasty without ever becoming queen herself.

Margaret was born on 31 May 1443 into the powerful Beaufort family, descendants of King Edward III through John of Gaunt.

Her father died before she was a year old, leaving her one of England's richest heiresses. Wealth, however, did not bring freedom.

Like many noble girls of the fifteenth century, her future was decided by powerful men. She was married at just twelve years old to Edmund Tudor, the half-brother of King Henry VI.

Only months later, Edmund died while imprisoned during the Wars of the Roses, leaving his young wife pregnant and alone.

In January 1457, at Pembroke Castle, thirteen-year-old Margaret endured a difficult childbirth that nearly claimed her life.

The baby survived. She named him Henry Tudor. The birth was so traumatic that she never had another child.

Everything she would accomplish from that day forward would be devoted to protecting the life of her only son.

The England Henry inherited was torn apart by the Wars of the Roses.

The rival houses of Lancaster and York fought for the throne, and noble families changed sides as fortunes rose and fell.

Henry spent much of his youth in exile across the English Channel, while his mother remained in England, carefully navigating one of the most dangerous political landscapes in the kingdom.

Margaret understood that survival required patience as much as courage. She entered strategic marriages, built relationships with influential nobles, and quietly gathered support for her son's claim.

She was deeply religious but beneath her calm appearance was an extraordinary political mind. Every decision she made brought Henry one step closer to the throne.

When Richard III became king in 1483, Margaret's efforts intensified. She worked with supporters of both the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, including Queen Elizabeth Woodville, to unite two bitterly divided factions.

Their plan was bold: if Henry defeated Richard, he would marry Elizabeth of York and bring an end to decades of civil war.

On 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor landed the decisive victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Richard III was killed in battle, becoming the last English king to die on the battlefield.

Henry was crowned King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. It was not simply a son's triumph. It was the triumph of a mother who had spent nearly thirty years protecting a single hope.

After Henry became king, Margaret held a position unlike any woman in England. Though never queen, she was known as "My Lady, the King's Mother."

She enjoyed remarkable authority at court, signed official documents, advised the king, managed vast estates, and was treated with a level of respect usually reserved for royalty.

Many ambassadors recognized her as one of the kingdom's most influential figures. Her influence reached beyond politics.

Margaret became an important patron of religion and education, supporting scholars, and helping establish lasting educational foundations at the University of Cambridge.

Her legacy was not only a royal family but also institutions that survived for centuries.

Margaret Beaufort died on 29 June 1509, only weeks after the death of her beloved son, Henry VII.

She lived just long enough to witness the accession of her grandson, Henry VIII, ensuring that the dynasty she had struggled so hard to create would continue.

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Lady Margaret Beaufort (31 May 1443 – 29 June 1509) was a major figure in the Wars of the Roses of the late 15th century, and mother of Henry VII of England, the first Tudor monarch.

She was also a second cousin of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III of England.

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Caroline of Brunswick

On the morning of 19 July 1821, the Queen of England turned up at her husband's coronation and was barred from entering.

Caroline of Brunswick had married George, Prince of Wales, on 8 April 1795 at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace.

They'd met three days earlier. George took one look at his bride, walked to the other side of the room, and asked for a glass of brandy.

Caroline told the man who'd escorted her from Germany that the prince was fat and nothing like his portrait.

Why marry at all? Money.

George had run up debts of around £630,000, a fortune, and Parliament wouldn't touch them unless he married a suitable Protestant princess and produced an heir.

There was also the small matter of Maria Fitzherbert, whom he'd already secretly married in 1785. That marriage broke the Royal Marriages Act, so legally, it was nothing. Awkward all the same.

Their daughter Charlotte was born in January 1796. The marriage was over within months.

George went back to his mistresses. Caroline set up her own household and did roughly as she pleased which, in the Georgian court, was scandal enough on its own.

In 1806, he had her investigated over rumours she'd borne an illegitimate child, a boy called William Austin she'd taken in.

The commission found nothing, though it gave her a good telling-off about her behaviour. Her access to her own daughter was cut back regardless.

By 1814, she'd had enough of England and left for the Continent. She toured Europe with a growing entourage, one of whom was an Italian named Bartolomeo Pergami.

He started as her courier. He ended up her chamberlain, riding in her carriage and living in her house. Every spy George could pay for wrote it all down.

Then George III died on 29 January 1820, and the woman he'd spent twenty-five years trying to be rid of became Queen of the United Kingdom.

He offered her £50,000 a year to stay out of the country. She came home instead, and the crowds cheered her all the way into London.

So George put his wife on trial.

The Bill of Pains and Penalties would have stripped Caroline of her title and dissolved the marriage.

Italian servants were shipped over to testify about bedrooms and boat trips. The evidence was printed in the papers. The cartoonists had the time of their lives.

It backfired spectacularly. Most people didn't think Caroline was a saint. They just couldn't stomach the sight of the most notoriously unfaithful man in England prosecuting his wife for adultery.

She became the people's queen almost overnight, her face on medals, plates and jugs.

The bill scraped through its third reading in the Lords by nine votes on November 10. Nine.

The government took one look at the Commons and quietly dropped the whole thing.

Caroline had won. But George still had the coronation. Her name was struck from the service.

On July 16, her chamberlain Lord Hood wrote to say the Queen would be attending and would like to be shown to her seat.

The reply was polite and it was final: it was not His Majesty's pleasure.

She went anyway.

Her carriage reached Westminster Hall at six in the morning. The guard asked for her ticket. She was refused, tried a side door, found a line of armed soldiers, tried the House of Lords, got nowhere.

Twenty minutes later, she was at the Abbey door by Poets' Corner, where Hood announced her to the doorkeeper: "I present to you your queen, do you refuse her admission?

He did. No ticket, no entry. Hood had a ticket of his own and offered it, but it admitted one person only and Caroline wouldn't go in alone.

The doorkeeper, by the way, was probably one of the professional prizefighters George had hired for the day. The King of England hired boxers to keep his wife out of a church.

The doors shut. The crowd shouted "Shame!"

She got back in her carriage and went home, and inside the Abbey, her husband was crowned in the most expensive ceremony this country has ever staged.

That night, she felt ill. She got worse for three weeks, put her papers in order, and burned her letters.

She died at Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith on 7 August 1821, aged 53, nineteen days after the coronation.

Her doctors thought it was an obstruction of the bowel. Others said cancer. The story went round that she'd been poisoned, which tells you exactly how much the public trusted her husband.

She asked to be buried in Brunswick under a plain inscription:

"Here lies Caroline, the Injured Queen of England."

The government wouldn't even let her coffin travel through the city on its way out in case the crowds rioted.

They were probably right to worry.

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Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (Caroline Amelia Elizabeth; 17 May 1768 – 7 August 1821) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Queen of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until her death in 1821 as the estranged wife of King George IV. She was Princess of Wales from 1795 to 1820.

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George IV (George Augustus Frederick; 12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and King of Hanover from 29 January 1820 until his death in 1830.

At the time of his accession to the throne, he was acting as prince regent for his father, King George III, having done so since 5 February 1811 during his father's final mental illness.

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Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons

She came to Troy not to win the war. She came to die in it.

Her name was Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons.

She arrived on the plain of Troy in the weeks after Hector's funeral, when the Trojan cause was already tilting. The city knew it. So did she.

But she had not come because Troy needed saving. She had come because she needed what only war could offer.

Months before her arrival, during a hunt, she had thrown a javelin that went wide. By the account preserved in post-Homeric tradition, the weapon was meant for a deer. It killed her sister Hippolyta instead. The death was an accident. The guilt was absolute.

Under the warrior code she carried, blood guilt of that kind could not be settled in gold or ceremony. It required an answer in blood: either the killing of enemies, or the death of the killer.

Penthesilea made her choice. She would go to Troy, fight with everything she had, and let the outcome balance the account.

She arrived with twelve Amazon warriors at her side.

On the battlefield, by the account in Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, she fought with a ferocity that shook the Greeks.

Some accounts name Ajax among those she bested. The Trojans, who had not felt hope in weeks, lined the walls to watch.

For a stretch of that day, she pushed the Greek forces back toward their ships. That had not happened since Hector was alive.

Then Achilles came onto the field.

He, too, was carrying something. His closest companion Patroclus was dead. He had already killed Hector in vengeance. He was fighting now with nothing left to prove and nothing left to protect.

Two people at the edge of what they could carry met in the middle of the plain.

The accounts differ on the particulars of their duel. They agree on the outcome. Achilles killed her.

When he removed her helmet and looked at the woman he had just fought, something in him broke. Ancient sources describe grief, astonishment, an emotion the chroniclers could not name cleanly.

A soldier named Thersites mocked him for it. Achilles killed him for that.

He returned her body. He would not leave her in the field.

She came seeking a warrior's death. She received one. Whether it resolved the guilt she carried is a question the poets left open.

The queen who arrived at war already broken.

The duel that produced a grief no one expected.

The moment when the greatest fighter of his age wept over the woman he had just killed.

Troy produced many stories. Few carry that particular weight.

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📷 : A red-figure cup painted in Athens around 460 BC, now in the Antikensammlungen in Munich, depicts the precise moment Achilles kills her.

Their eyes are shown meeting at the instant of death. Scholars know the painter primarily from this work and gave him the conventional name the Penthesilea Painter.

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Sybilla of Normandy

In medieval Europe, being born a king's daughter could open every door or quietly lock every one of them.

Yet Henry I had plans.

Sybilla was born around 1092 in Domfront, Normandy, carrying a secret she had no control over.

She was the illegitimate daughter of Henry I of England, one of the most powerful rulers in Europe, and his mistress, Sybilla Corbet of Alcester.

Her maternal grandfather was Robert Corbet of Alcester, part of the Corbet family.

Everyone knew who her father was. No one pretended she had the same place as his legitimate children.

Instead of hiding his daughter away, he transformed her into a political prize. In 1107, Sybilla was married to Alexander I of Scotland, a match that astonished many contemporaries.

Kings rarely chose an illegitimate daughter for such an important alliance. Henry sweetened the arrangement with an exceptionally generous dowry, reminding everyone that while Sybilla may have been born outside marriage, she remained unmistakably a daughter of the English king.

As Queen of Scotland, she earned an unexpected reputation. Chroniclers described her as intelligent, gracious, and deeply devoted to charity.

She became known for supporting churches, caring for the poor, and encouraging religious communities. In a court where alliances shifted as quickly as loyalties, Sybilla cultivated something far more valuable than fear: respect.

Then, just as quietly as she had risen, she disappeared.

Sybilla died on 13 July 1122, still a young woman, after little more than a decade as queen.

The exact cause of her death has never been recorded, leaving later generations to fill the silence with speculation. Some whispered illness. Others imagined the dangers of childbirth. The truth vanished with her.

Alexander never remarried.

That decision raised eyebrows then and still fascinates historians today. Whether it reflected profound grief, political calculation, or both, no one can say with certainty.

What remains undeniable is that an illegitimate daughter, born with every reason to be overlooked, became a queen remembered not for scandal but for the unusual affection she inspired.

In an age obsessed with bloodlines, Sybilla proved that legitimacy could determine a birth — but it could not always define a legacy.

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Alexander I (c. 1078 – 23 April 1124), posthumously nicknamed The Fierce, was the king of Alba (Scotland) from 1107 to his death.

He was the fifth son of Malcolm III and his second wife, Margaret, sister of Edgar Ætheling, a prince of the pre-conquest English royal house.

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Princess Alice of Battenberg

There was a time when one of Europe's princesses was quietly declared unstable, shut away in a psychiatric clinic, and separated from the children she adored.

Her story should have ended there. Instead, it became one of the most extraordinary transformations of the twentieth century.

Princess Alice of Battenberg had already lived a life few could imagine. Born into royalty and profoundly deaf from early childhood, she learned to read lips in several languages and moved through Europe's glittering royal courts with remarkable determination.

Then her world unraveled.

After Greece's monarchy collapsed, her family fled into exile. Financial ruin, political upheaval, and relentless personal strain followed.

In 1930, after experiencing a severe mental health crisis marked by intense religious beliefs, Alice was committed to a Swiss sanatorium.

The decision remains controversial. Sigmund Freud was consulted, and one of his recommendations involved X-ray treatments intended to suppress her libido — an intervention that today is viewed as deeply misguided.

While she was institutionalized, her marriage collapsed, and she became painfully estranged from her children.

Many assumed the disgraced princess would simply disappear. Instead, she quietly rebuilt her life.

During the Nazi occupation of Athens, Alice remained in Greece while many others fled. Then came the decision that would define her legacy.

She hid the Cohen family, a Jewish widow and two of her children, inside her home, knowing that discovery could mean execution.

When questioned by the Gestapo, her deafness became an unexpected advantage. She simply claimed she could not hear their questions.

After the war, Israel honored her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, recognizing those who risked everything to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

She spent her final years not in luxury but serving the poor as a Greek Orthodox nun. When she died in 1969, she owned little more than her religious habit.

History remembers many princesses for the crowns they wore. Princess Alice is remembered for what she chose to do after almost everything else had been taken away.

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Princess Alice of Battenberg (Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie; 25 February 1885 – 5 December 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, and paternal grandmother of King Charles III.

After marrying Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903, she adopted the style of her husband, becoming Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark.

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