#Killyleagh

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1835 – The coffin of mummy, Takabuti, was opened and unrolled in Belfast Natural History Society’s museum at College Square North. 

Takabuti was the first Egyptian mummy to be brought to Ireland. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a brisk trade in Egyptian mummies. She was brought to Belfast in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Ballymenoch House, Holywood, Co Down. Her hieroglyphs were deciphered by a leading Egyptologist from Ireland, Dr Edward Hincks, of Killyleagh, Co Down. The horizontal inscriptions gave the names and titles of…

[scoutingthetrooper]

x

[celticcrossanon]

Personally, I've had enough of this circus. The monarchy does nothing to stop them and we end up wondering if there is not a double game on the part of Charles and the palace. Four years have passed and so many things that could have been done and nothing happened. The palace protects these two traitors and considers the public stupid. They could have taken away the duchy from them, demoted them to the rank of count and countess or worse, baron and baroness. All traitors.

Hi Nonny,

I think many people are feeing fed up with the Harkle antics and the lack of a firm response from the palace. I know I am. I agree that more could be done to minimise the Harkle damage.

I would start by making a very clear distinction between them and the rest of the royal family, in a way that would be understood by people in any country, such as taking Harry off the royal website. King Charles made a good beginning in his speech shortly after his accession where he spoke of William and Catherine as The Prince and Princess of Wales and referred to Harry as Harry, while wishing him well in his life overseas, but - he then didn't follow it up with any action to reinforce that distinction, so Harry was able to continue to imply that he was an important member of the royal family, and there was nothing to contradict this on the website or in his titles.

With respect to the titles, my understanding is they go together, as a group. The format is to have a Dukedom in England, an Earldom in Scotland, and a Barony in Northern Ireland (Wales is reserved for the heir to the throne). Prince William's titles upon marriage followed the same format (Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus), as did Prince Andrew's (Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh) and Prince Philip's (Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich). Prince Edward was unusual in that he was made and Earl, not a Duke, and promised the Dukedom of Edinburgh in due course (Earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn). He also held no Scottish or Northern Irish title until he was granted the Earl of Forfar for use in Scotland on his 55th birthday.

As the titles were bestowed together, to my mind they should be removed together, which would leave Harry as The Prince Harry and Meghan as The Princess Meghan (EDIT: Correction: The Princess Harry/Henry, not Meghan - my mistake, sorry). I would much rather have the HRH style and Prince title permanently removed from Harry, leaving him as the plain Duke of Sussex, or have all titles stripped from him, leaving him as Harry Mountbatten-Windsor. I would also be happy to see him vanish from the royal website. If both of those happened I would be very happy, as then Harry Mountbatten-Windsor could live his life with the privacy that he keeps saying he desires, with no public ties to the BRF. He could be on the same level as Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, who have both managed to live without titles.

[nerosunero]

3 July 2022, Killyleagh Co Down

[wwwjohnohare-blog]

Killyleagh not far from Ardglass in a jam jar. @manhattanlegaleagle @picnickillyleagh #killyleagh (at Killyleagh) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRho_DQn-Af/?utm_medium=tumblr

[everythingroyalty]

titles next! titles next!

[found-fabricated]

Found objects- half screw, sea tumbled brick, ceramic rose, nail and old ceramic bottle top, Killyleagh, Northern Ireland.

[castlesandmanorhouses]

Killyleagh Castle, Killyleagh, County Down, Northern Ireland.

www.castlesandmanorhouses.com

Killyleagh Castle dominates the small village of Killyleagh. It is believed to be the oldest inhabited castle in the country, parts dating back to 1180.

It's current appearance follows the architectural style of  Loire Valley châteaux, having been redesigned by architect Sir Charles Lanyon in the mid-19th century.

The castle has been owned by the Hamilton family since the early 17th century.

[royalpain16]

Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York

[hazyshadesofme]

Fortress

Autumns, roses, loves, leaves. Leavings and losings. Moons, stars, sorrows, souls. Forevers and goodbyes.

  Fine webs spun off the tattered edge of a torn heart.

  Broken

Bleeding

Beautiful

  Pain. Ache. Loneliness. Things that make it hard to breathe. Things that make it easy to cry.

  Things that turn on the light before we reach the switch.

  The wishes we shouldn’t make. The things we don’t…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1835 – The coffin of mummy, Takabuti, was opened and unrolled in Belfast Natural History Society’s museum at College Square North. 

Takabuti was the first Egyptian mummy to be brought to Ireland. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a brisk trade in Egyptian mummies. She was brought to Belfast in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Ballymenoch House, Holywood, Co Down. Her hieroglyphs were deciphered by a leading Egyptologist from Ireland, Dr Edward Hincks, of Killyleagh, Co Down. The horizontal inscriptions gave the names and titles of…

[royal-confessions]

“I know Johnson’s too sick in the head to remove Duke of York, but Nicola Sturgeon and Paul Givan should really consider stripping Andrew of his titles: Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh. Just to piss off the Royal Family even more, they should also suggest giving both titles to Archie lol.” - Submitted by Anonymous

[theirishaesthete]

A Long Way from the Loire

A Long Way from the Loire

Despite looking as though it belongs in the Loire Valley, Killyleagh Castle rises close to the south-western shore of Strangford Lough, County Down. The oldest part of the building was constructed in the late 12th century by the Norman knight John de Courcy and this subsequently passed into the control of the O’Neill family. However in the early 17th century Killyleagh was given by James I to a…

[yetanotheremptypage]

no escaping your love #38: la ci darem la mano

(Read 1-37 here.)

#87. “I saved you a seat.”

Of all the social obligations placed on the Viscount and Viscountess Bridgerton, Anthony was dreading tonight’s opera the most.

He’d told Kate the night before that he had an early morning and they would probably not eat together. But when he’d woken up, it had been with her flush against him and his body had reacted on impulse, one she’d been all too happy to engage in. Her tray had arrived just after they’d finished, panting in each other’s arms and exchanging secret little smiles.

Her lady’s maid had left and he’d snuck a piece of toast off of her tray, but there was no scolding like usual when they fought over her tray’s contents. In fact she’d suddenly looked quite...small. Sad, even.

“Kate?”

“Hm?” she’d said, blinking back to herself. “Sorry, I was miles away.” She’d reached for her tea, taking a rather healthy gulp that did nothing to reassure him that she was alright. “I’ll see you tonight at Covent Garden?”

“Yes,” he’d agreed, kissing her. He’d glanced down at his pocket watch and swore, practically running to his dressing room call for his valet, her laughter trailing behind him.

It wasn’t until he was in Parliament and heard the Earl of Wexford and the Baron Killyleagh discussing tonight’s performance of Don Giovanni that it finally occurred to him:

Covent Garden. Don Giovanni. Starring Siena Rosso.

Remember, the woman his wife knows, for a fact, was once his mistress?

And Good Lord, did it really have to be Don Giovanni? A little on the nose.

He had two options. He could follow his plan, meet Kate at the theatre just before the performance began, and whisk her home right after. Or he could keep Kate home and devote himself to her fully.

No. That second one was too much like love.

He perfectly timed his return to their lodgings with the departure of her carriage, trying to ignore the stabbing guilt. He’d truly turned her over to the ton, many of whom knew that Siena had once been his mistress, without any sort of protection. While his mother knew that he’d had mistresses from the Covent Garden sent, she’d clearly not known Siena was one of them, or the woman never would’ve been allowed to perform in her home. Benedict, though, had probably put two and two together last year. For Kate’s sake, Anthony prayed that his brother hadn’t left her side tonight.

The lobby was clearing when he finally arrived, and he boldly climbed the stairs towards the Bridgerton box two at a time. Eloise and Benedict were huddled together at the back of the box, engaging in a tense, whispered conversation, while Colin had gamely sat next to their mother near the front. Kate was in the middle, and the only one who turned at his entrance.

“There you are. I saved you a seat.”

That got his mother’s attention, and she smiled at him quickly before turning back to Colin. He slid in next to Kate, admiring the green dress and matching parure she was sporting tonight.

“You look beautiful,” he whispered in her ear, pressing a kiss to her neck.

“We have company,” she hissed.

“I don’t care.”

And he did it again, just to prove his point. In fact, he didn’t let go of her hand for the entire performance. He could barely concentrate on it, not when Kate was here, wearing a gown cut just a tad too scandalously for polite society, the silk of her gloves sliding against his own, and if his mother hadn’t been three seats down, he very well might’ve ravished her right then and there.

He’s not sure he heard a single note of the entire opera. Certainly not any of Siena’s.

Kate, Kate’s happiness, Kate’s pleasure, that was all he cared about, for however long he could provide it for her.

(And that was the last opera they ever voluntarily attended.)

[xhxhxhx]

Alan Allport’s Britain at Bay (Knopf, 2020) is great on all the ways the United Kingdom was an only imperfectly free country at the beginning of the Second World War. 

On the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act:

Police power in Northern Ireland was very different in character from elsewhere in the UK, owing to the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, or SPA. The SPA was originally passed in the emergency conditions of 1922 at the end of the Irish War of Independence. Its powers had only been supposed to last one year, but it was found to be so useful that it was annually renewed by Stormont up to 1933, and made permanent thereafter.

Using the authority granted to it by the SPA, Northern Ireland’s government could impose curfews, prohibit public gatherings and protest marches, ban newspapers, arrest members of the public wearing uniforms or bearing items associated with proscribed organisations, search for and seize contraband goods, indefinitely detain those suspected of ‘subversive activity’ or exclude them from entering Northern Ireland, punish anyone making a report ‘intended or likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty’ and, in broad terms, ‘take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order’. In December 1938 the SPA was used to introduce internment without trial for suspected IRA men. Some of these detainees were taken to a prison hulk called the Al Rawdah, moored off Killyleagh, into which they were packed in bronchitic squalor for five months. The SPA granted Craigavon’s executive virtually unlimited domestic powers of control and surveillance, which were directed specifically at an ethno-religious minority regarded as a parasitical and disloyal enemy within. The SPA formed, in the words of a National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) report in 1936, ‘the basis for a legal dictatorship’. W. J. Stewart, a progressive Unionist critical of the UUP, described Northern Ireland’s government in the 1930s as ‘more completely in control of the six counties than either Hitler or Mussolini in their own countries’.

[...]

The police responded to the [IRA’s 1939] bombing campaign in different ways, some constabularies taking great pains to distinguish IRA terrorists from the Irish community at large, some less so. Newspaper stories from the Spanish Civil War had been full of reports about seditious ‘Fifth Columnists’, and the possibility that Irish migrants might be providing sanctuaries for IRA men did not seem completely fantastical. In London the Metropolitan Police asked hotel and boarding-house staff to provide details about any new visitors with Irish addresses or accents. The public was encouraged to report sightings of Irishmen ‘idling’ during daylight hours on the streets of the capital. S-Plan attacks provoked panicky and legally dubious police work. After the Piccadilly bombing constables ‘dashed through the crowd haphazardly’, as one witness later put it, rounding up dozens of men with Irish brogues. The whole operation was conducted with such a lack of basic procedure that all of the detained men had to be released later in the day for want of evidence – including a couple of suspects who, it turned out later, really had been involved in planting the bomb.

On the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act:

Earlier in 1939, the S-Plan terrorist campaign had provoked a similar kind of test, on a smaller scale, of how far the British were willing to compromise their traditional civil liberties in the name of public safety. In July 1939 the home secretary had introduced the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act to the Commons, a remarkable piece of legislation rushed through Parliament at breakneck speed, largely forgotten in the subsequent hubbub of war but something that ought to be better remembered than it is. The Prevention of Violence Act granted the home secretary the authority to prohibit anyone who had been resident in Great Britain for less than twenty years from entering or re-entering the country if it was believed that they were ‘concerned in the preparation or instigation […] of acts of violence designed to influence public opinion or Government policy with respect to Irish affairs’. He could expel such persons from the United Kingdom and detain them for up to five days prior to that expulsion. The Act allowed, for the first time in history, a political appointee to imprison, deport and exile British subjects without reference to the courts. It also empowered the police, under certain circumstances, to conduct searches and seizures of suspects’ property without obtaining a judicial warrant first. British subjects – as all Irishmen and -women still legally were in 1939, even those living in the Free State – had never been subject to such peacetime restrictions before.

Hoare insisted to Parliament that the new Act was a ‘temporary measure to meet a passing emergency’ which would remain on the statute books for no longer than two years. Some MPs were not convinced. They saw it as an attack on Britain’s culture of democracy. ‘We are proud that this is a free country,’ argued William Wedgwood Benn (father of Tony and grandfather of Hilary). ‘Our people hold their heads a little higher because they believe they enjoy a measure of freedom […] I do not think public opinion will be assisted by giving the Home Secretary power to turn us all into ticket-of-leave men, if he so wishes.’ In return, supporters of the Act regarded these objections as a sop to terrorists. ‘What about King’s Cross?’ demanded Sir Joseph Nall, Tory MP for Manchester Hulme. ‘What about the people who are being maimed and killed?’ It was much better, he argued, ‘to deport a dozen innocent persons than to allow one innocent person to be killed’. The Prevention of Violence Act passed into law.

Even before the Second World War broke out, then, fears of terrorism had already caused the government drastically to revise traditional assumptions about the freedoms of the individual British citizen. The Prevention of Violence Act was a first step in the creeping Hibernicisation of British law during the twentieth century, a process in which restrictions on civil liberty originally applied in ‘troubled’ Ireland were progressively transferred to the rest of the United Kingdom as well. In time, an indefinite state of emergency would become the new normal.

On the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act and Treachery Act:

All of this [invasion scare] seemed to suggest that the democracy itself could not be trusted in a crisis. Only by abandoning the ‘present rather easy-going methods’ of national life and adopting a set of restrictions ‘which would approach the totalitarian’ could Britain survive a Nazi onslaught, the Cabinet was warned by Chamberlain on 18 May. The legal apparatus for such a siege dictatorship was established four days later, when a new Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed by the Commons in its entirety in just two hours. This was an extension of the existing emergency legislation passed at the outbreak of war which now gave the government almost unlimited authority to regulate people, property and capital without the need for parliamentary scrutiny. As the new minister for labour later observed, it made him ‘a kind of Führer with powers to order anybody anywhere’. A Treachery Act passed the same day made it a capital offence to assist the enemy’s military operations or to hamper Britain’s own.

As the Times put it, the Emergency Powers Act ‘comes near to suspending the very essence of the Constitution as it has been built up in a thousand years. Our ancient liberties are placed in pawn for victory.’ A slew of regulations soon circumscribed even the most quotidian features of the British citizen’s life. It was unlawful to ‘endeavour to influence […] public opinion in a manner likely to be prejudicial’ to the war effort, to take part in a strike, to withhold information about an invention or patent if the state demanded it, to hold an unauthorised procession, to put out flags, to operate a car radio or to put icing on a cake (wickedly wasteful of sugar). Chamberlain hoped that public opinion would back these restrictions; but if not, recalcitrant non-cooperators could be drafted into a compulsory labour corps under prison discipline.

The creation in mid-May 1940 of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later renamed the Home Guard, ought to be seen in this context of government nervousness. Private citizens had responded to news of the German parachute landings in the Netherlands and Belgium by announcing the formation of ad hoc militia companies to defend their homeland. Whitehall felt it had to act quickly to control the process. One quarter of a million men aged between seventeen and sixty-five registered to join the new auxiliary force within the first week of its announcement, and by July 1940 its nominal strength stood at 1.5 million.

On Regulations 39BA and 18B:

Sir John Simon’s 1938 prophecy that rearmament and war would turn Britain into ‘a different kind of nation’ seemed to have come true. Moreover, it had happened with a remarkable lack of discussion or opposition. ‘A united nation feels no hesitation or misgiving’ about the abandonment of its personal freedoms, insisted the Times when the Emergency Powers Act was rushed through Parliament: ‘the temporary surrender [of liberties] is made with a glad heart and a confident spirit.’ That was not altogether true. There would be resistance to some of the more controversial powers the government had acquired for itself. That said, the assault on other values, particularly the presumption of innocence in law and the protection of minorities, inspired rather less sympathy.

The very British right to grumble out loud produced an early skirmish in this conflict over liberties. Regulation 39BA, introduced in June 1940, made it a criminal offence, punishable by up to a month in prison, to circulate ‘any report or statement relating to matters connected with the war which is likely to cause alarm and despondency’. It was announced at the same moment the Ministry of Information launched a ‘Silent Column’ campaign that condemned spreading rumours and gossiping about the war effort. The government was not shy about using its new power. By late July there had been over seventy prosecutions. A tradesman in Yeovil was jailed for thirty days for saying ‘Hitler will be here in a month’. A Bristol septuagenarian earned himself a week in prison for claiming that the Swastika would soon fly over Parliament.

As the summer wore on, however, a press backlash caused the government to retreat. Churchill admitted to the Commons on 23 July that, however ‘well-meant’ it had been, Regulation 39BA had had the unfortunate effect of criminalising ‘silly vapourings which are best dealt with on the spur of the moment by verbal responses’. The Silent Column was put into what he called ‘innocuous desuetude’, and the Home Secretary was asked to review all ‘alarm and despondency’ convictions. To what extent the Order’s continued existence had a chilling effect on free expression is unknowable. (‘Best to pass no opinion these days,’ as one Briton was reported saying by Home Intelligence. ‘You might get hung.’) Could anyone be certain that that innocuous pollster or Mass Observer asking them questions about the war was not a government provocateur?

A more ominous issue came up in August, when the government sought to create special regulations to deal with a crisis in which heavy bombing or invasion had halted normal legal procedures in some parts of the country. It proposed the creation of regional ‘War Zone courts’, presided over by experienced judges and appointed by the lord chancellor. Although these would not be military tribunals or courts-martial, they would nonetheless have the power to impose death sentences without appeal. ‘If we are not shot by the Germans we are evidently going to be shot by our own people,’ one Briton commented on hearing the news. The proposal was attacked in the Commons as far too vague, considering its life-and-death stakes. The Home Secretary’s reassurance that such courts would only operate with the greatest restraint was condemned as feeble by the barrister and Liberal MP Frank Kingsley Griffith: ‘it is all very well for anybody to come before this House and say, “I have a Bill which entitles me to cut off your head, but I can assure you that I am only going to cut your toe nails.” ’ In the end, the government retreated and promised that all War Court sentences would be subject to appeal. They were, in the end, never used anyway.

The Home Office received enough popular pushback against both Regulation 39BA and the War Zone courts for it to moderate its plans on the grounds of civil liberty. There was much less public concern provoked by the mass incarceration without trial of British citizens, which began on the morning of 23 May with the arrest of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Under Defence Regulation 18B, the Home Secretary could detain indefinitely anyone of ‘hostile origin or associations’ or who had recently committed ‘acts prejudicial to the public safety’. Anyone so interned had a right of appeal to an advisory committee, but they were not allowed to know who had recommended their arrest, or why.

Regulation 18B had existed since the outbreak of war but was only now applied with any seriousness. By July 1940 over 700 BUF members and fellow-travellers of the far right had been swept up, most to Brixton Prison (only a single Communist Party member, a Yorkshire shop steward accused of sabotaging workplace production, joined them).

Not great!

[found-fabricated]

Shoreline wall, Killyleagh , Northern Ireland