Tea at Trianon: Matilda of Flanders

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, August 6, 2010

Matilda of Flanders

The Queen of William the Conqueror.

As queen, Matilda used her newfound wealth to continue financing and expanding the Holy Trinity Abbey back in Caen, although with her customary dedication to Christianity she enthusiastically supported the reforms of the English Church which her husband and Archbishop Lanfranc were introducing, including forbidding priestly marriage and the corrupt selling of church offices. Under his wife's influence, William became more and more religious as he grew older and the Queen's household was noted for its regular attendance of Mass and its exemplary morality. The Queen was certainly not above throwing a tantrum when her husband took a mistress and faced with his diminutive wife's rages, William eventually ceased his adulteries altogether.