Tea at Trianon: The Finding of Charles I

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

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Finding of Charles I

From The Lothians:

At St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle on the 1st April 1813, there occurred the opening of the coffin of King Charles I who had met his fate by execution in 1649. But why was this deemed necessary and what took place at the opening? And why was the vault re-opened yet again in 1888? Let us look at the facts.

A search had been made for the burial place by his son King Charles II, "Yet such had been the injury done to the Chapel, such were the mutilations it had undergone, during the period of the Usurpation [Cromwell's rule], that no marks were left, by which the exact place of burial of the King, could be ascertained."

The published accounts of those who had first hand knowledge of the burial also proved unsatisfactory thus the matter rested. But Sir Henry Halford, Physician to the King and the Prince Regent, writes in 1813 that "an accident has served to elucidate a point in history, which.... had [been] involved in some obscurity."

After construction of a vault under the 'Tomb-House' [now the Albert Memorial Chapel], it was in 1813 found necessary to widen the passage to it from under the Choir of St. George's Chapel. In constructing this enlarged passage an aperture was accidentally made into a vault through which the workmen could see three coffins. It was then assumed, from published accounts, that these were the coffins of King Henry VIII, his Queen Jane Seymour, along with that of King Charles I. (Read more.)