Tea at Trianon: An Elusive Queen

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

Friday, January 3, 2014

An Elusive Queen

Marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York

What was Elizabeth of York really like? I never knew that they had addressed her as "Madame la Dauphine." From Nerdalicious:

At a 500-year remove, in an age that seldom recorded women’s lives, her character remains elusive. It’s hard to separate the flattering and politically aware descriptions ambassadors and contemporaries made about Elizabeth of York from the private woman. While chroniclers were not above obliquely criticizing queens, the most that we can assuredly ascertain from many of their remarks is that she was close to her family and relatively inoffensive — or shrewd enough not to reveal her true feelings. The portrait that comes down to us is, in some ways, the stock portrait of many medieval queens: kind, charitable, selfless, and loving — the ideal queen.

Yet most medieval nobles were not necessarily renowned for being loving and kind. Hugh Trevor-Roper once cynically remarked, “Why must the tomb be prefabricated, the masses prepaid? It is because, in spite of all this lip service to family, nobody really trusted anyone else, not even his sons, once his power over them was gone. In reality the family was not cultivated as such: it was a necessary alliance from which every man hoped individually to profit.” ¹

Today many of us believe that the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and neither of Elizabeth’s parents hesitated to exercise power. Elizabeth was raised to be a queen, addressed as the dauphine, and, as the eldest, privileged beyond all her other siblings, except maybe her brothers. It pushes credulity to believe that Elizabeth would grow up to be kind and humble despite all childhood indications that she would be as power hungry as her family or contemporaries – unless, of course, something changed.

Elizabeth’s childhood vacillated between privilege and anxiety. Perhaps, after her father’s death, anxiety ultimately overrode what might have been a tendency towards arrogance. (Read more.)