Tea at Trianon: A Brief History of Royal Pets

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

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

A Brief History of Royal Pets

From Vanity Fair:

Charles II of England, the “Merry Monarch,” loved amusement and being amused, and besides women, nothing amused him more than his beloved dogs. First pictured with a little spaniel in a Van Dyck painting at the age of five, he would become so famous for his love of these small dogs that a breed—the Cavalier King Charles spaniel—would eventually be named after him.
After he became king in 1660, he would often bring his dogs to council meetings, much to the annoyance of famed diarist Samuel Pepys. “All I observed there is the silliness of the king,” he wrote of a trip to Whitehall in 1667, “playing with his dog all the while, and not minding the business.” Others were more amused by the king’s indolence, with Lord Rochester composing the following ditty: “His very dog at council board / Sits grave and wise as any lord.”
According to the journalist H.V. Morton, the king’s lighthearted nature also won the praise of the general public. “Nothing endeared Charles to the ordinary folk of his time more than his habit of walking in St. James Park with his dogs, and the hours he spent playing with the birds in his aviary in Birdcage Walk or in feeding the ducks on the canal,” he writes. Unfortunately, the king occasionally lost his dogs in the park. In 1660, he placed the follow (Read more.)