Tea at Trianon: János Hunyady

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

Sunday, August 19, 2018

János Hunyady

From Nobility:

Governor of Hungary, born about 1400; died 11 August, 1456; the heroic defender of the Catholic Faith against the advance of the Osmanli; father of King Matthias I (Corvinus) of Hungary. The origin and parentage of his family was not ascertained until recently, when modern investigation cleared up the numerous legends which surrounded the Hunyadi family. The historian Bonfini derived the family from the Roman gens Corvina, or Valeriana, in order to flatter his king, Matthias Corvinus. Gáspár Heltai in his chronicle makes Hunyady the illegitimate son of King Sigismund and a Wallachian peasant-girl. Others try to establish the purely Hungarian origin of the family; others again put in a plea for its Serb or Wallachian origin. In view of modern investigations it may be taken as proved that the family of Hunyadi was of Rumanian origin; János Hunyady himself, however, may be regarded as a Hungarian from his birthplace; probably he spoke the Wallachian language only during his youth, and no doubt was born in the Catholic faith, which his father Vajk (Voik, Vuk) probably had already professed. The oldest ascertained member of the family was called Serbe, whose son, Vajk, the father of János Hunyady, was already in possession of the hereditary seat of the family, the castle Hunyad, before 1407. The parentage of the mother of Hunyady underwent an exhaustive scrutiny at the hands of modern critics. While formerly his mother, Elizabeth, was supposed to belong to the family of Morzsinay, it was recently shown by János Karácsonyi, that for various reasons the marriage of Hunyady’s father with a member of the family of Morzsinay is inadmissible. However, the name of Hunyady’s mother has not been ascertained up to the present time. The year of Hunyady’s birth is either one of the last years of the fourteenth, or one of the first years of the fifteenth century. According to Count Joseph Teleki, the historian of the House of Hunyady, he was born in 1387. The birthplace of Hunyady is equally unknown. (Read more.)