Tea at Trianon: Henry the Young King

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

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Henry the Young King

Henry the Young King was the second son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He had an older brother named William. To quote:

For Eleanor, William’s birth was a special triumph of her own. At thirty, with two daughters born in the fifteen years of marriage to Louis Capet, despite accusations that she was unable to produce a son, she was delivered of a healthy boy, future heir to her duchy. She had reason than most to rejoice. And she did. It must have been the very moment when she definitively said goodbye to her gloomy past with Louis and welcomed her bright and promising future with Henry. When William was ten months old, she became pregnant again and on 28 February 1155 gave birth to her second son, Henry. With succession secured, William and Henry’s royal parents could focus on reestablishing order which had been lost during Stephen’s reign. In the opening months of 1155, exactly on 10 April, shortly after Henry’s arrival into this world, both William and Henry were taken to Wallingford, where their father, the king ‘had called together the barons and bishops of the realm to swear allegiance to his eldest son and, in case of William’s death, to Henry as his second heir’, a ceremony which neither of the boys could remember. Not a year passed since the occasion, when little William fell ill and died.

In his chronicle Robert of Torigni, abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel gives 2 December 1156 as the date of William’s most untimely passing. Robert was the royal familiaris, well acquainted with both Henry II and Eleanor and thus a trustworthy source, but this time he got his dates wrong. William died in the spring of 1156. The princeling was buried in Reading Abbey, at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I. The abbot of this grand Henry I’s foundation grabbed at the opportunity to gain future royal patronage and wrote in 1160 to Queen Eleanor hoping to convince her of the ‘spiritual benefits that the commemoration of his house could offer her’.(Read more.)