Tuesday, June 17, 2025

'Queen Lucy & Queen Mary'

 

The South came into being during the age in Western history when the idea of man’s ability to participate directly in the life of the Holy Trinity, to know God through an actual union with His divine energies, had been rejected (see Fr. John Strickland’s very helpful book The Age of Division for an elaboration of this time period in Church history).  Nevertheless, since God Himself is, as St. Dionysius the Areopagite (+1st century) says, Beauty Itself (The Divine Names, chapter IV, section VII), man has a natural inclination toward what is beautiful; he is drawn toward it and desires it, having an intuitive sense that it is connected mystically to God, the Source of all being and goodness (sections IX and X).  But because of Dixie’s ignorance of the reality of participation and union found in the Orthodox Church, she, like the rest of the West after the separation from the Orthodox, had to find a way to satisfy her natural hunger and longing for beauty.  She did this by trying to capture beauty in an earthly container of some kind.

Southerners found various ways to capture and express beauty:  rhetoric, gardens, architecture, literature.  But the most potent embodiment of beauty for Southerners by far is woman.  Southern society has always been down-right enchanted by them.  From Alexander Meek of Alabama’s chivalric antebellum poetry (“A Soldier’s Love Dream,” for instance, pgs. 119-20), to Poe’s mixing of death and womanly beauty in his poem The Raven (“The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe: Essays and Reviews, Library of America, New York, 1984, pgs. 16-19), to the beauty pageants and cotillions that still go on today in parts of the South, the fair and comely woman is at the heart of Dixie’s culture.

Perhaps the most beautiful of them all is Lucy Holcombe Pickens, who has been called the “uncrowned queen of the Southern Confederate States.”  Born on 11 July 1832 in Tennessee, related to Austrian royalty through her Grandmother Holcombe, nearly everything about her life breathed royalty, wealth, and virtue.  It also intersects with the Orthodox Church, as we shall see.

There was jewelry, silverware, and travel along the Mississippi when growing up.  A visit to the Mississippi State Legislature with her family when she was 17 led to its adjournment:  So many of the legislators felt it necessary to escort her to the dock as she left for New Orleans that not enough were left to gather a quorum.

Her first love, a Lt. Crittendon, was killed in an attempt to begin a revolution in Cuba to free the island from Spanish rule in 1851.  She wrote a well-received fictional novel describing the events, The Free Flag of Cuba.

Her second suitor appeared in 1858, Francis W. Pickens.  He was one of the South’s planter politicians, and had married twice, only to have both wives die.  He was struck at once by her beauty, which was described by someone at this season of her life as “[t]all, willowy, with titian hair said to resemble a woof of sunbeams spinning out like a flower at the ends, with eyes to shade that two men could never agree upon.”  He was soon asking Lucy’s father for permission to wed his daughter.  She herself was agreeable to the proposal, but asked Mr. Pickens, as some stories relate, to get an ambassadorship in a foreign country out of a desire to see the wider world.  He asked President Buchanan for such a one, and was appointed ambassador to Russia.

 . . .

The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/queen-lucy-queen-mary/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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