Tea at Trianon: When Wellington Met Nelson

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

Saturday, June 6, 2015

When Wellington Met Nelson

From Making History:

Yes, history has a few examples of when two such great people met; sometimes as old friends, sometimes as old enemies, but the cases are very rare indeed, and none more so than when two of Great Britain’s most venerated and iconic military leaders met one day for an hour; Sir Arthur Wellesley, later to become Duke of Wellington, and Horatio Nelson, the greatest Naval commander of all time.

Luckily, Wellington later recalled the meeting one day at Walmer Castle on October 1st 1834 in a conversation with the noted diarist John Wilson Croker, who asked him if he had ever met the great Admiral, and what his thoughts were concerning the great man’s reputation for egotism and vanity, which conversation was recorded in the Croker papers for posterity.

It was September 1805; Wellesley had just returned from India where he had won the outstanding Battle of Assaye, and was arrived at the Colonial Office in Downing Street where, on the same day, Nelson had arrived to be given the Naval commission which would see him dead within a month at his greatest victory at Trafalgar.

In answering Croker’s question, Wellington recalled the meeting:

“Why,” said the Duke, “I am not surprised at such instances, for Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps, an hour.”

“It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into a little waiting-room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman whom, from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord Nelson.” (Read more.)