Tea at Trianon: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the English College

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

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Bonnie Prince Charlie and the English College

From The Venerable English College Archives:

Christmas is a time for carols, even if this year we may only be able to sing them from the comfort of our home, and none is more popular than O Come, All ye Faithful. This is a Victorian translation of a Latin hymn, Adeste Fideles, probably written by John Francis Wade (1711–86), an English Catholic musician who spent most of his adult life in Douai, in France.
It has been suggested that the hymn contained a coded reference to a ‘joyful and triumphant’ event that took place in the Palazzo Muti, Rome, 300 years ago this New Year’s Eve: the birth, on 31 December 1720, of Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart (1720–88), better known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. Indeed the words of the hymn, ‘born the King of Angels’ (Regem Angelorum), contained a wordplay on ‘King of the English’ (Regem Anglorum), for the new-born baby who, in the eyes of his supporters, would one day become the rightful ‘King Charles III’. (Read more.)