Tea at Trianon: Inchkeith: The Island of Women

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

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Inchkeith: The Island of Women

From Vanished Objects:

An English diplomat Thomas Randolph wrote that merry men joked that Inchkeith Island in the Forth, between Edinburgh and Fife, ought to be called the Isle des Femmes, because there were so many women on it. Usually called the Island of Horses, Mary of Guise, queen regent of Scotland preferred the name God’s Isle, and accounts for fortification of the island in 1555 call it both the Isle aux Chevaux and Isle Dieu. The account details women and horses on the island as part of a large workforce building and maintaining a fortress intended to defend the Forth with artillery. So this was less of joke and more of an observation.

The fortifications were devised by Lorenzo Pomarelli, an Italian architect and military engineer who was paid 150 livres tournois for his contribution on 22 October 1555. Pomarelli wrote in 1573 that he had spent six years in Scotland, presumably working for Mary of Guise between 1554 and 1560. The weekly account was made by chief supervisors on the island, Jehan Alain Farques and Jehan Francoys, and signed off by a soldier called Claude Heliot, who was at this time ‘extraordinary comptroller for war’ and later employed in the artillery works at Edinburgh Castle. Claude was in charge of work and workers on the island, (NRS E34/21 (3) f.34r.)

The summary account for the project, the Estat, is addressed to Guise’s household comptrollers, Bartholmew de Villemore and Astier. The total spend in the 1555 season was 6,453 livres tournois 9 solz, with 5,955 livres on the building work with 333 livres given to John Stewart Prior of Coldingham, a brother of Mary Queen of Scots, perhaps to be spent at Coldingham and St Abbs. Master Black of Leith was compensated for the loss of his boat, sunk in Forth with a load of stone, par fortune de temps. Some of the income came from tax payments for fortifications received in Leith by sir William MacDowall, royal master of works, for the collectors Sir John and Richard Maitland of Lethington – a contribution from Aberdeen was recorded in the town’s records. (Read more.)