Tea at Trianon: The Trial of Sir Walter Ralegh

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, November 21, 2012

The Trial of Sir Walter Ralegh

A transcript. To quote:

Sir Walter Ralegh was tried for treason in the great hall of Winchester Castle on Thursday 17 November 1603. As with almost all treason trials of the period, the result was a foregone conclusion: he was found guilty. The jury took less than fifteen minutes to reach its conclusion, surprising even the king’s counsel, the recently knighted Sir Edward Coke, in its speed: he was still out walking in the castle gardens when the verdict came in.

And yet, the day was in many respects a personal triumph for Ralegh.

Hitherto, he had been widely detested by both his peers and the populace for his arrogance and apparent avarice. He had been, one courtier said a year or two previously, ‘the most hated man in England’. Indeed, the journey from his prison in the Tower of London to the castle in Winchester – the court was out of London because of an outbreak of plague – was particularly fraught. ‘It is almost incredible with what speeches and execrations he was exclaimed upon all the way through London and the towns as he went; which they say he neglected and scorned, as proceeding from base and rascal people. They threw tobacco-pipes, stones and mire at him, as he was carried in the coach,’ a friend at court wrote to the earl of Shrewsbury. (Read entire post.)