Tea at Trianon: Tales from the 18th Century Old Bailey

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, May 3, 2015

Tales from the 18th Century Old Bailey

From Madame Gilflurt:

In 2017, Pen and Sword will publish my second non-fiction work, Tales from the 18th Century Old Bailey. The book will offer a peek into the annals of the most famous criminal court in the world, in what must arguably be the most tumultuous century in British history. In an era when the Bloody Code sent thousands of men and women to the gallows and saw children transported to the far side of the world for what seem now like the most trivial of wrongdoings, an appointment with the judges of the Old Bailey was the last thing any self-respecting miscreant wanted to receive!

From bloody murder to impulsive shoplifting via not so dandy highwaymen and the real stories behind Mother Clap’s Molly House, a microcosm of Georgian society passed through the Old Bailey as tragic prostitutes and murderous hangmen alike found themselves standing before the bench. (Read more.)