Tea at Trianon: The Pillaging and Plundering of the English Monasteries

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, April 7, 2022

The Pillaging and Plundering of the English Monasteries

From Joseph Pearce at Crisis:

In terms of realpolitik, Henry would not have been able to get his hands on the wealth of the Church without bribing the nobles with a promise of a share of the plunder. Had the aristocracy not been bought in this way, they would no doubt have rebelled in defiance of the king and in defence of the Church. It was, therefore, in appealing to the baser appetites of the ignoble nobility that Henry succeeded in sacking the Church and removing its power from his realm.

What Henry unleashed, once the pillaging began, was a feeding frenzy of greed, which he could no longer assuage or control. He complained to Thomas Cromwell, whom he had put in charge of overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, that “the cormorants, when they have got the garbage, will devour the dish”. Cromwell reassured him that there were more rich pickings in the larger abbeys that had not yet been pillaged. “Tut, man,” the king replied, “my whole realm would not staunch their maws.” By the time that the dissolution of the monasteries was complete, the king was not much wealthier than he had been before the debauch began. Even worse, from his perspective, was the realization that he had inadvertently compromised his own position of power by creating a new secular plutocracy, a new class of “lords of the manor”, which owned the huge tracts of land that had previously belonged to the Church and the wealth and power associated with such ownership. As for the monasteries themselves, it is only possible to offer a few examples of the tragedy of the plunder and of the heroism of the monks and nuns. (Read more.)