Tea at Trianon: What Happened to the Princes in the Tower?

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, September 12, 2012

What Happened to the Princes in the Tower?

After so many years there is still speculation.

In 1483, the date of the last incontrovertible sighting of the princes, we are faced with two conflicting accounts, those of the French spy Dominic Mancini and the Great Chronicle of London. According to the latter the boys were seen ‘shotyng and playying in the Gardyn of the Tower by sundry tymys’ during the mayoralty of Sir Edmund Shaa which ran until 28 October, while according to Mancini they were simultaneously ‘seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether’. If both reports are to be believed, the ‘sundry tymys’ would have had to be between 16 June, when young Richard of York joined his brother in the Tower, and the early days of July when Mancini left England. In fact the phrase ‘sundry times’ implies a longer period than about three weeks and one may well doubt the accuracy of Mancini’s informant(s). The fact that there were already rumours about the probable death of one or both of the boys need surprise no one. Imagination tends to run riot where rumours about royal personages are concerned, and the journalistic mind certainly pre-dated the media. (Read entire article.)