Tea at Trianon: The Sinking of the "Britannic"

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

Thursday, July 26, 2012

The Sinking of the "Britannic"

A disaster I have never heard of until now.

Weighing in at 50,000 tons, the Britannic was the largest ship ever built in the British Isles at the time of her launch in 1914. She was four thousand tons heavier than her unlucky sister Titanic and five thousand heavier than her eldest sister, and future running mate, Olympic. Together, the two surviving sisters were intended to operate a weekly crossing of the north Atlantic - with one leaving from New York, at the same time another would leave from Southampton in England. Unlike her sisters, however, the Britannic was not the largest ship in the world at the time of her construction. That honour had already gone to a 52,000-ton German liner, the Imperator, and would soon go to her sister, the 54,000-ton Vaterland - which, like Britannic, was pandering to the ultra-patriotic environment of 1914. However, she was to remain the largest ship built on British soil until the Queen Mary in 1936 - quite the achievement for Harland & Wolff. (Read entire post.)