Tea at Trianon: The Brief Life of Guildford Dudley

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

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Brief Life of Guildford Dudley

Author Susan Higginbotham shares her research on the ill-fated husband of Lady Jane Grey, saying:

Jane’s last days have been described in detail; Guildford’s have not. Among the graffiti carved into the walls of the Beauchamp Tower by the Dudley brothers is the word “Jane,” which might have been Guildford’s effort; it is unlikely to refer to his mother by the same name, as she was in no danger of death and there was no need to memorialize her. At some point Guildford wrote a message to his father-in-law in a prayer book, the one which Jane was to take to the scaffold: “Your loving and obedient son wishes unto your grace long life in this world with as much joy and comfort, as did I wished to myself, and in the world to come joy everlasting your most humble son to his death G Duddley.”[27] A few pages later in the same prayer book, Jane added her own note to her father: “The Lord comfort your grace and that in his word wherein all creatures only are to be comforted and though it has pleased God to take away 2 of your children, yet think not, I most humbly beseech your grace, that you have lost them but trust that we, by losing this mortal life have won an immortal life and I for my part, as I have honored your grace in this life, will pray for you in this life. your Grace’s humble daughter Jane Duddley.” Jane had expressed nothing but contempt for Guildford’s own father after his downfall; it says something about Guildford, surely, that he was able to write without rancor to Jane’s father, the man whose ill-advised participation in Wyatt’s rebellion had sealed his fate.