A secret no more

After nearly a month of blessed irrelevance, I am a little sorry to see this blog now shows up on Google. It is still unknown on Bing.

To mark the occasion, as it is the blog name that gets the hit, here is where that title comes from:

The character of James remains disappointingly obscure. Here was a royal rake who became a devout believer. Charles II, himself a crypto-Catholic libertine, was reputedly appalled by James's folly in matters of religion and sex: "My brother will lose his kingdom by his bigotry, and his soul for a lot of ugly trollops."

I read that review article a few years ago now and immediately fell in love with the tag crypto-Catholic libertine that John Mullan uses for the two Stuart rakes. I have no idea whether Mullan came up with it himself or whether it appears elsewhere. As of today, Google finds exactly two links, the review in The Guardian and this blog. In any case I decided as soon as I read it that I would find a way to "own the insult", even though it was not aimed at me.

I don't hold much of a brief for the Stuarts. They were imprudent, ineffective leaders and the sort of guys who give libertinism a bad image in their private lives. That said, they inspired a lot of good poetry and fiction and, from a distance of a few hundred years, are a lot of fun to consider.

I should note that libertines who are also devout Catholics are not so rare in occurrence as John Mullan assumes. Casanova, most famously, never saw any contradiction between his life and his Catholic faith. The first censoring of Casanova was undertaken not to remove sexual references but to remove what his first French editor found to be disturbingly religious and pro-royalist sentiments.

In England, the aesthetes converted to Catholicism with considerable regularity and it sometimes seems like the more decadent they were, the more likely the conversion.

And then there is me.