Tea at Trianon: Death of Henri IV

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, July 12, 2020

Death of Henri IV

From Vincent J. Pitts, Henri IV of France: His Reign and Age:

On a cloudless day in May 1610, a solitary figure stepped out of the shadows on a narrow Paris street and murdered his king with a carving knife. The assassin later insisted that he had acted to prevent his sovereign, Henri IV, from “making war on the pope,” a justification offering more than a little unintended irony. Henri IV’s success in ending decades of debilitating civil war between Catholics and Calvinists underlay the achievements of his reign. His death at the hands of a religious fanatic made him the last prominent victim in the cycle of sectarian violence he sought to close.

The French have never forgotten the monarch so savagely slain that day. Henri’s image has undergone many transformations over the intervening centuries as generations of polemicists and historians have fashioned an Henri to their own liking. Seventeenth-century chroniclers saw him as a pious and dutiful monarch; eighteenth-century authors portrayed a skeptical, tolerant, enlightened despot; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, royalist and republican alike, found use for an earthy, jovial, crowned peasant, a son of the southwest, whose personal traits were those of a French “everyman”. In all these incarnations, however, Henri remained the king who had put an end to decades of civil strife, restored his kingdom to prosperity, and reclaimed France’s place as a leading power in Europe, able and willing to challenge Spain for predominance on the continent. (Read more.)