Tea at Trianon: The Tory Tradition

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, August 14, 2020

The Tory Tradition

From The Imaginative Conservative:

The term “Tory” began as a seventeenth-century pejorative appended to Stuart loyalists, that in the original Gaelic meant “Irish robbers.” As often happens, the derogatory name was adopted by its adherents, and “Tory” stuck, soon labeling one of two political parties (the other being “Whig”) in the United Kingdom. The historical inspiration for Toryism also dates from the 1600s, in their identification with Royalism and the cause of King Charles I in the English Civil War. “The traceable origin of Toryism is the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings as heads of a National Church,” wrote Maurice Henry Woods, private secretary to the Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, in 1924. “From the blood shed at Whitehall on that cold wintry morning went up a thin vapor which spread like a miasma over the later period of the Commonwealth.” After 1688, this royalism morphed into a loose political party united around loyalty to the Crown (oftentimes as protection against the depredations of the aristocracy) and Church, and largely populated by rural landowners, citizenry of the smaller cities and towns, and the Anglican clergy. (Read more.)