Tea at Trianon: Raine, Countess Spencer

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, July 15, 2017

Raine, Countess Spencer

From The Irish Times:

Born in 1929, with the proverbial silver spoon, she was, reputedly, seen as an infant by the young Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth who observed: “What a lovely, fat baby”. Raine grew up to be voted ‘Debutante of the Year’ during ‘the Season’ in 1947 and, the following year, married the future Earl of Dartmouth. She dabbled in politics and was elected a councillor for the Conservative Party in London having canvassed voters dressed in her jewellery and furs. Her obituary in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ noted that until the late 1960s - at the height of ‘Swinging London’ - she still had “a footman wearing white gloves in attendance at even the most informal lunch”.

She divorced her husband in 1976 and swapped one earldom for another - by marrying the also-divorced 8th Earl Spencer. She nursed him for years after he suffered a stroke but also, controversially, funded a redecoration of Althorp, the Spencer estate in Northamptonshire, by selling some of the family heirlooms. She was reputedly disliked by Earl Spencer’s children who cruelly dubbed her ‘Acid Raine’. That didn’t prevent her attending the fairy-tale wedding of her step-daughter Diana to Prince Charles in 1981.

Earl Spencer died in 1992 and Raine was forced to leave Althorp. She remarried, for the final time, a year later, the French aristocrat, the Comte de Chambrun - but the marriage didn’t last. She died in London in October 2016 and was survived by three sons and a daughter from her first marriage. (Read more.)