Tea at Trianon: Of Loyalty, Roses and Broom Shrubs

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, October 4, 2016

Of Loyalty, Roses and Broom Shrubs

From Lioness at Large:

The Plantagenets ruled England for some 300 years, but from the beginning they were not a peaceful dynasty: Henry II quarrelled bitterly (and perhaps prophetically, over the respective powers of Church and State) with the charismatic Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, whose murder he may or may not have ordered; and he quarrelled even more violently with his wife, the strong-willed Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his sons, (Young) Henry, Geoffrey, and Richard, later known as “the Lionheart.” Richard, in turn, would see his brother John trying to take his kingdom away from him while he was in captivity in Germany; nevertheless he very generously forgave John, however, and, having no legitimate heirs of his own, named him heir to his throne upon his death. (This was, of course, the John they nicknamed “Lackland” (Johan sanz terre) after he had lost Normandy to the king of France; the King John of Magna Carta fame (or infamy) and of Robin Hood lore.) And just as the Plantagenets’ very ascendancy to power had already been brought on by a dynastic struggle – the so-called Anarchy, the (first) English Civil War between Stephen of Blois and Henry II’s mother, the Empress Maud, ensuing when Maud’s father Henry I of England (the last Norman king) died without leaving a son and Stephen challenged Maud’s right to the throne – so, too, the dynasty’s rule went down in the violent convulsions known as the Wars of the Roses; spurred on by a lethal mix of ambition, power grabs, greed, envy, injustice (both perceived and real), vengeance, cruelty, suffering, incompetence, and, quite simply, a vast surfeit of royal blood. And it didn’t exactly help that the largest amounts of royal blood were not necessarily always accumulated in the veins of those who were actually occupying the throne. (Read more.)