Tea at Trianon: Tributes to Elizabeth II

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

Monday, September 19, 2022

Tributes to Elizabeth II

At age 14, the future Elizabeth II had a radio broadcast to encourage the children of Britain during the blitz. Even at a young age, she was helping her people.

From Damian Thompson at The Spectator:

The Queen Remembered was a survey of a 70-year reign expertly boiled down to eight 15-minute episodes by James Naughtie. He was so even-handed that I almost missed the flamboyant bias of his time on Today. (If you want to hear the BBC in full mourning, track down Naughtie’s reports from Washington when George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004.)
Although the script wasn’t short on clichés – ‘Coronation Day became the stuff of memories’; ‘borne along by the river of history’; ‘A Thoroughly Modern Monarch’, etc – they didn’t matter because the underlying analysis was so subtle. But don’t ask me to summarise it, because I was too distracted by the archived interviews, which among other things demonstrated how drastically the voices of the establishment changed during the Queen’s reign.
The 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth’s vowels, which turned ‘happy’ into ‘heppy’, were antiquated even in 1940, and it wasn’t until the last decade of her life that the traces of this essentially Victorian accent became hard to detect....
The most touching reminiscence came from Lady Pamela Hicks, happily still with us, who accompanied the new Queen on the flight back from Kenya after her father’s death. Elizabeth waited until the last minute before dressing in black and, looking out of the plane as it touched down, noticed that her own car had been replaced by much grander vehicles. ‘Ah, they’ve sent those hearses,’ she said – a horribly poignant observation when you consider what was happening at Balmoral as the programme was being broadcast. (Read more.)

HERE is an excellent article on the duty of praying for departed monarchs. It seems some people need extra encouragement to pray for the departed if the person happened to be royal.

Meanwhile, there were rainbows. From Country Life:

Queen Elizabeth II’s death sparked an outpouring of grief from billions of people around the world, and people came together to pay their respects to a woman who will go down in history as one of Britain’s greatest monarchs. In a quite extraordinary moment, a rainbow broke out over Windsor Castle at the moment of the announcement of Her Majesty’s passing, and the hugely experienced royal photographer Chris Jackson was there to capture it.

‘As the flag is lowered to half mast over Windsor Castle and the minute the passing of HM The Queen is announced an incredible rainbow appears over the castle, for a few minutes,’ Chris wrote on Instagram. ‘And then just like that it was gone…’

Huge crowds had gathered at Windsor, and indeed at all the other royal residences, as people came together to help each other as they started to process the sad news. (Read more.)

The Queen's favorite residences. From The English Home:

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Her Majesty The Queen. In her honour, we take a look at three of her favourite Royal residences in the countryside. A profound love of the countryside has been shared by many generations of our Royal Family. Her Majesty The Queen once said that she is happiest in the wilds of her Balmoral estate where, as she put it in a BBC documentary in 1992: “One could go for miles and not see anybody… endless possibilities.” Away from the public gaze, the Royal Family regularly get together at their country homes to relax and enjoy fresh air, family fun and everything that the countryside has to offer. (Read more.)