Tea at Trianon: The First Battle of St. Albans

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

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The First Battle of St. Albans

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

Today [May 22] is the 560th anniversary of the First Battle of St Albans in 1455, which is usually considered the first battle in the Wars of the Roses. That, of course, depends on whether you see the conflicts of the mid to later fifteenth century as one or a set of wars, or rather see the various short-lived outbreaks of violence as not necessarily directly related, or indeed much out of the ordinary for later medieval politics in England or Europe as a whole.

There is an online account of the day at First Battle of St Albans. One distinguished historian summed it up as little more than a scuffle in a street, which is not altogether unfair. (Read more.)