Ooooh I've been waiting for this thread!

A few days ago I was in this thread writing about lions and their place as a national symbol for England, when someone (u/letsgocrazy) asked "Why is the unicorn the national animal of Scotland?" This bothered me for a while so I went and looked it up.

One thing I retracted (I deleted it myself once I realized it was wrong) was that I wrote that the lion and the unicorn were not considered enemies to my knowledge. The reason I didn't know about their antipathy is because it doesn't pop up very often in my era of medieval history, but it became a bigger trope in the later middle ages/Renaissance. It did exist pre-medieval, too, in the works of St Ambrose (I haven't found the citation yet, but historians mention it). The reason that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland doesn't have a whole lot to do with that, though.

In the 15th century (one source says the beginning, another says the 1480's so I'm not sure exactly, but definitely late medieval) the royal family of Scotland intermarried with a French family which had unicorns in their coat of arms. The Scottish family then incorporated two unicorns into their coat of arms. Fast forward 125 years to 1603 when James IV of Scotland became James I of England. At this time the English royal coat of arms had two lions, and as a symbol of the unity between Scottish royalty and English royalty brought upon by James' ascension to the throne, one of those lions was replaced by a unicorn. This was when the unicorn became a real national symbol for Scotland. References to the unicorn and lion fighting for the crown in England came about from this (every single book I found about unicorns mentioned an English nursery rhyme from like the 18th century about this).

Sources:

Gotfredsen, Lise. The Unicorn, Abbeville Press Publishers, 1999.

Beer, Rüdiger Rober. Unicorn: Myth and Reality, James J. Kerry Inc., 1977.

As I mentioned in the other thread though, I'm not an expert on heraldry, I just study medieval animals, so I'm sure there's more to say on the matter.

Week 71

 

For his many flaws, one thing can be credited to Giuseppe Mazzini: that he was the first among the Italian political minds to appeal to the people – not that the people listened, by and large – but Mazzini spoke of them, and to them as political actors and no longer as walking characters on the background of history. And like his transcendental view of the nation, Mazzini's conceit of the people may have formed before the people themselves were ready to walk the scene.

The insurrection – the first stage of the national revolution – had to rely on the people, and to adapt to the needs and possibilities of the people. Which may appear as a quite reasonable argument, as often happens with those giving the poorest practical results.

The war of the people, was a “war of bands”.

The last revolutions – explained Mazzini in the early 1830s – wanting to wage war in the way used among governments, had left untouched those forces which laid indifferent due to their habit, but which might have been awoken terribly at one single word. They reneged their own nature and were doomed. […] Then it was claimed that the Italian energies had not been awoken, because they had been consumed by the long period of servitude and by the self-interest of a mid-way existence between civilization and barbarism. But who had even tried to wake up such energies […] ? Who appealed to [the sentiments] of hatred and revenge? And hatred and revenge, despicable in themselves, become the holiest of sentiments when the victim is the foreign looter and the altar that of freedom and of the Motherland. […]

And why were the revolutions of Naples, of Piedmont and of Central Italy dead already before combat even started? Because of […] the fears and recriminations of the notables, the aristocracies and duplicity of the professional military, with their high stature within the old government; because they wanted to defend the revolution by means of regular armies […] and they failed.

The last of these failures, and one which influenced Mazzini more than the revolutions of 1820-21 (back then he was, after all, only fifteen), had been the 1831 movement sparked between Modena, Parma and the Papal Legations in the aftermath of the July Revolution in France. It took a while for the revolution to spread to Italy, from July 1830 to February 1831 – unlike other European nations which were readier to ignite. In part, the last ten years of reaction and the strong Austrian presence discouraged any large scale initiative; in part, those conspiratorial threads which had not been interrupted had continued to entangle the minor active insurrectional cores in a network of largely pointless initiatives, where the revolutionary themselves were often struggling with discouragement and mistrust towards their connections.

In this climate a strange plot had begun to form around the peculiar figure of Enrico Misley – a man who, throughout the years 1825-31, apparently managed to keep close contacts with the national conspiratorial groups on one hand, and with the Duke of Modena, Francesco IV of Hapsburg-Este on the other. The Duke, a crafty and ambitious reactionary, encouraged perhaps by his ties to the Hapsburg House, had begun to consider his chances of expanding his small dominion with the addition of other Italian states – either coming from the Hapsburg themselves, or by inheriting the Kingdom of Piedmont through his wife (the King Carlo Felice's niece) if the King of Piedmont had removed the Prince of Carignano (future King Charles Albert) from the succession line. Misley appeared more concerned with the possibility – a remote one, to be fair – of promoting a dynastic change that would advance the process of national formation, maybe even with the approval of the Great Powers themselves, as rumors went that the Austrians were committed to expanding eastwards (it was after all around the time of the Greek independence), which may have created the opportunities for a round up of the Italian borders (ideas which would return to prominence around mid XIX Century in the form of the doctrine of “Balkanization of Austria-Hungary”). No little part was played in this affair by the deep hostility of certain groups of the Italian conspirators for the Prince of Carignano, due to his conduct during the 1821 Piedmontese revolution and the subsequent support given to the reactionary policies of his uncle the King, which encouraged them to seek any alternative rather than accepting his ascension to the Piedmontese throne as the one “Italian” King.

It's reasonable to assume – given the subsequent events – that the Duke of Modena, far from approving the political ideas and the “national” views of his conspiratorial connections, was nonetheless willing to play along (as he did by allowing free circulation to well known subversive elements and even providing them with passports), both to see what was going to come out of it, and to keep his own “subversives” in check.

Without following every detail of the affair, Misley left Modena for Paris in April 1830, where he apparently met with the Duke of Orleans himself – and renewed his contacts with the Orleanist elements, likely in hope to gain the French support for his future Italian initiatives. In part, it was the subsequent affirmation of the Orleanist fraction that excluded a direct support of French elements for the Italian movement, given that such an action taken by the new French government would have certainly found a strong opposition in Vienna. The new French King was in fact keen on dispelling any idea of excessive liberalism, and allegedly – soon after his ascension – had shared informations on the activities of the Italian patriots with the Austrian government.

If these news might have discouraged the conspiratorial leadership of the Italian groups, the suggestion of the new French revolution worked the opposite effect among those elements who had been more active in the organization of the basis of the supposed upcoming insurrection. Meanwhile, in a clear confirmation of his duplicitous conduct, a few months after he had refused to recognize the new French government, the Duke of Modena had favored Misley's return to Paris in December 1830 – Misley then left Ciro Menotti, who had spent the year establishing insurrectional committees within the Duchies and the Papal Legations, to take care of things in town.

The Legations especially had good reasons for being restless regardless of the French events. As we mentioned before, the death of Pius VII in August 1823 had ended a period of moderate rule in the Papal States – with a few attempts of laical reforms of the state administration made by the Secretary of State, card. Consalvi – and opened a phase of predominance of the intransigent faction, with the election of Annibale della Genga, Leo XII.

On May 5^th 1824 the new Pope had released his first encyclical, Ubi primum - a strong encouragement to the clergymen not to evade their pastoral duties. The times – explained Leo XII – demanded it:

So many battles, indeed, and so fierce have sparked in our times, and almost every day up against our Catholic religion! […] A fire that threatens to engulf the whole earth, to ruin walls, cities, forests immeasurable, and every corner of our land; a yeast, which added to flour, wants to spoil the whole mass. […]

There is a sect, you sure are aware of, which, usurping for itself the attribute of philosophical, has resurrected from their ashes a score of almost all the worst errors. This sect, under the deceiving appearance of good natured piety and liberality, preaches tolerance [“tollerantismo” - so they call it – in the original], or indifference [“indifferentismo” - again in the original], and extends it not only to civil matters, of which we say no word, but to religious matters as well, teaching that God has granted all men a vast freedom, in such a way that anyone, without negative consequences, can embrace and practice the sect and opinion they favor, according to their own judgment. […] It's true that such a mistake is not a new one, but nowadays it rages against the stability and integrity of the Catholic faith. […] since its followers, not only acknowledge all those sects which, outside of the Catholic Church, accept the revelation as their basis and foundation, but they proclaim brazenly that even those societies which, rejecting the divine revelation, profess actual deism or, even worse, naturalism, are on the right path.

[…] The iniquity of our enemies has reached the point that, outside of their collection of books, insidious and in opposition to the doctrine of faith, they dare twist against Religion those same holy writings which have been given us from above for the edification of Religion itself […] We do strongly encourage you to keep our flock far from these deadly feeding grounds […] You can count on the assistance of the temporal princes, who – as history and reason both prove – by defending their own cause, also defend the authority of the Church. It won't ever be possible, in fact, to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, unless one also renders God the things that are God's.

Shameless re-plugging because why not, but the other day I did an answer about eyewitness sources for early Māori battles involving guns.