Tea at Trianon: The Imprisonment of Mary Stuart

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

Friday, January 19, 2018

The Imprisonment of Mary Stuart

From Smithsonian:

This frosty missive belongs to a trove of 43 letters that was recently donated to the American Trust for the British Library. The documents in this remarkable collection, which include four letters signed by Elizabeth I and others written by high-ranking officials like Sir Francis Walsingham, all relate to Mary’s imprisonment in England, where she was held for 19 years before her execution.

Mary fled to England in 1568, after an uprising forced her to abdicate the Scottish throne in favor of her infant son. She hoped that her cousin, Elizabeth, would offer refuge, but Mary’s arrival unnerved the English queen. Mary was Catholic; Elizabeth was a Protestant. Concerned that Mary would become the focus of plots to depose her and install a Catholic monarch, Elizabeth ordered her cousin to be placed under the strict supervision of English noblemen.

For most of her long confinement, Mary was kept at a manor in Derbyshire, in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury. But in 1584, she was moved to a dreary castle further inland, and transferred to the charge of the statesman Ralph Sadler. The British Library’s newest collection of letters span the period in which Mary was in Sadler’s care, from the summer of 1584 to the spring of 1585. It was a tumultuous time for both the Scottish queen and Europe at large. Religious wars were raging in France, the Protestant William of Orange had been assassinated by a “fanatical Catholic,” and a plot against Elizabeth’s life had recently been foiled. With the possibility of insurrection and assassination lurking constantly in the shadows, Elizabeth and her supporters became increasingly nervous about Mary. (Read more.)