Tea at Trianon: British Queens and the Virgin Mary

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

Monday, February 23, 2015

British Queens and the Virgin Mary

From Confessions of a Ci-devant:

Marie de Guise, the statuesque French widow who famously rejected Henry VIII's clumsy proposal of marriage by making a thinly-veiled quip about poor Anne Boleyn, went on to marry Henry's estranged nephew, King James V of Scotland, a man torn between his twin desires for flesh and faith. Marie had just given birth to their only surviving child, Mary, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception 1542, when James sickened and died, apparently broken by Scotland's defeat at the hands of the English army. Threatened by Henry VIII, Marie sent her daughter to France to live with her French family, the Guises, arguably the most powerful non-reigning clan in Europe at the time. Eventually, a marriage was arranged with the young girl to the French Dauphin. Back in Scotland, Marie held on to the reins of government in her daughter's name. It was a thankless task for which she was vilified by the new Protestant sect known as Presbyterianism, which originated in Scotland and which viewed the French-born Catholic queen regent as an evil strumpet. Pious and dignified, Marie died at Edinburgh Castle of oedema at the age of forty-four. (Read more.)