Tea at Trianon: The Tragedy of the Brothers York

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, July 17, 2020

The Tragedy of the Brothers York

From Literary Hub:

In the years that followed it began to turn inwards: a destructive chain of rebellion, deposition, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation and regicide, all originating within the house of York itself. The dynasty’s end was brutal. It came on August 22, 1485 at Bosworth, with the killing of Richard III, the ritual humiliation of his battered body and his burial in an unmarked grave in a Leicester priory. But whatever the victorious Tudors later liked to say about Bosworth being the victory of the red rose over the white, the battle was also a settling of scores between two factions of the house of York: white on white.

At the heart of this was the relationship between three royal brothers: Edward IV; Richard duke of Gloucester, later Richard III; and, sandwiched between them, the middle brother George duke of Clarence, who wanted to be king but never was. Contemporaries acknowledged that these were three men of unusual gifts: shoulder to shoulder, they were practically invincible. Yet as one Yorkist insider put it in the aftermath of Bosworth, the three brothers could not avoid conflict with each other. This, he implied, was the tragic flaw in the Yorkist dynasty.

The rise and fall of the house of York remains one of the most seductive and contested stories in English history. By the usual dynastic standards, it was over in the blink of an eye, the Yorkists’ twenty-four-year period in power lasting as long as their successor Henry VII’s reign on its own. The three brothers themselves burned fiercely and died young: Edward at forty; Clarence at 28; and Richard still only thirty-two when he was killed at Bosworth. (Read more.)