Tea at Trianon: Early Sixteenth Century Households

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, February 25, 2011

Early Sixteenth Century Households

What was the role of women? According to the blog Once I Was a Clever Boy:

My series of tutorials on sixteenth century women continued today by looking at women in two somewhat different households. The first was that of Thomas More at Chelsea, and in particular his eldest daughter Margaret Roper (1505-1544) and her sister-in-law Anne Cresacre (1511-1577). the other was that of the Dowager Duchess of Norkolk at Horsham St Faith and Lambeth, which produced Katherine Howard (c.1521-1542), Henry VIII's fifth wife.

They are interesting as households in that we have internal evidence of the way they functioned and in the lives of the women formed within them. More was in many ways exceptional in his interests and appreciation of the possibilities of female education. It was a serious, learned,pious household. As a friend once pointed out to me it anticipates the Puritan households of thelater decades of the century and of the next. Indeed another similar one might be the Ferrer household at Little Giddings in the 1630s and 1640s. With its humanist educational ideals it was unusual for its date in England apart from the Court and the circle around Queen Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, Princess Mary.