Tea at Trianon: Walsingham and Anti-Catholicism

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

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Walsingham and Anti-Catholicism

A book review by R.J. Stove.

This grand confusion can readily be observed, in any period, among those who spend too much time in secret police work. In a sense, it redounds perversely to Walsingham’s credit that even as his tactics involved recruiting agents, suborning double-agents, and if need be hiring the occasional triple-agent, his strategy remained clear: keeping Elizabeth alive and the “Whore of Babylon” at bay. He defended in theological terms not only the common-or-garden pursuit of recusant priests, but also the celebrated forgeries by which he destroyed Mary Queen of Scots: “I see the wicked creature,” he assured the Earl of Leicester, “ordained of God to punish us for our sins and unthankfulness.” (Read entire review.)