Tea at Trianon: The Fifth Bride

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

Monday, August 8, 2011

The Fifth Bride

Gareth Russell supplies the back story to Henry VIII's fifth wedding.

With all legal impediments now removed, the forty-nine year-old king could proceed with his marriage to a girl who was almost young enough to be his granddaughter by contemporary standards. At the time of his fifth marriage, Henry VIII was grossly overweight, increasingly temperamental, secretive, paranoid and the ulcer on his leg that he had incurred during a riding accident in 1536 had never properly healed over. Physically, he could not be described as anything other than terrifying and, to the eyes of someone as young and looks-conscious as Catherine, quite possibly disgusting as well. Catherine, for her part, cannot have been much older than seventeen at the time she married him and was quite possibly as young as fifteen. The daughter of an impoverished younger son of the mighty Howard clan, she had spent her childhood at the whims of her father's financial mismanagement and then in the capricious and patchy care of her often-absent grandmother. Although she was not nearly as intellectually stupid as subsequent historians and novelists would claim, she lacked both common sense and any form of self-discipline. Although she was kind hearted and certainly moved by stories of suffering, she was also extravagant, prone to teenage temper tantrums and compulsively flirtatious. Most importantly from Henry's point of view, however, she was vivacious, fun-loving, sexually titillating and incredibly attractive. (Read entire post.)