Tea at Trianon: The Fall of the Fitzmaurices

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

Saturday, February 20, 2021

The Fall of the Fitzmaurices

From The Irish Examiner:

Francis Fitzmaurice, third earl of Kerry, and his wife, Anastasia Daly, a Catholic divorcee 20 years his senior (a scandal in itself) went on living as they had always done, printing as many as 500 invitations to their lavish soirées and ordering the very best of food.
Whet your appetite on this sample from the caterers’ menu: smoked salmon from the Atlantic, olives, oysters, pâtés and terrines, smoked beef, pork, sausages, ham, lobster, several types of cheeses, gateaux, the best of wines, champagne and Cognac.
The earl used the “suppliers to the King” — Louis XVI, the man who would soon lose his head — to buy his tailored clothes, wigs, opera glasses and spectacles. Lady Kerry, meanwhile, frequented Marie Antoinette’s preferred designer and hatmaker, and was fond of perfume, lingerie and expensive jewels.
If you were to make it up, you might draw the line at the couple’s daily jaunts around revolutionary Paris in their luxurious four-wheeled carriage, which was emblazoned with the Kerry coat of arms and attended by liveried coachmen with powdered wigs.
The common people in Paris could not afford to buy bread while, back in north Kerry, the tenants on the earl’s once-large estate of 90,000 acres were living in cabins, eking out a miserable living to pay rents that did not even come close to funding Lord and Lady Kerry’s extravagant lifestyle.
Despite mounting debts, the spending continued and, by 1818, Francis Fitzmaurice had squandered his family’s titles, estates, wealth and lands, putting an end to a dynasty that had been Kerry’s most powerful family since their arrival in the county in the 13th century.
The story is told in fascinating and vivid detail by historian and genealogist Kay Caball in her new book, The Fall of the Fitzmaurices: The Demise of Kerry’s First Family. (Read more.)