Tea at Trianon: The Murders of Edward of Lancaster and Henry VI

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

Monday, May 28, 2018

The Murders of Edward of Lancaster and Henry VI

From The Richard III Society:

The ‘Crimes of Richard III’: The murders of Edward of Lancaster and Henry VI.
The year 1471 was a vintage year for ‘crimes’, no less than two of them being attributed to this year. Both of them are of interest because we have more evidence about them than we usually have and can show how the stories developed over about a century from descriptions of what actually happened to what Holinshed and Shakespeare said happened.

The first of them chronologically is the death of Edward of Lancaster, only child of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, at Tewkesbury. There are many contemporary sources, two of them written very soon after the battle of Tewkesbury. The first, a letter written by the Duke of Clarence on 6 May, says that Edward was killed in the battle. The Arrivall of Edward IV, Yorkist in sympathy and written only a month or so afterwards says that Edward was killed in the flight after the battle. There are five other accounts written in 1471 or soon after which confirm these statements, reiterated by the Lancastrian Warkworth in about 1478. No serious historian now doubts that Edward was killed in the fighting. (Read more.)