Tea at Trianon: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Dereliction

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

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Destruction, Deconstruction, and Dereliction

From Cambridge Core:

In 1585, Raphael Holinshed gloatingly celebrated the end of the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury in England in his Chronicles: ‘What remembrance is there now of Thomas Becket? Where be the shrines that were erected in this church and that chappell for perpetuities of his name and fame? Are they not all defaced? Are they not all ruinated? Are they not all conuerted to powder and dust?’Footnote 1 In his enthusiasm to outline how St Thomas had been rooted from the cultural landscape, Holinshed focused on the physical building blocks of his cult; on the shrine that had stood in Canterbury Cathedral from 1220 until it was pulled down in September 1538, on the churches and chapels that were named in his honour, and on the images and statues of the saint that had once existed in abundance.Footnote 2 Concentrating on the mortar and stone of the cult, Holinshed’s depiction of St Thomas’ obliteration is one of physical iconoclasm and the removal of devotional places and spaces from the map.Footnote 3 It did not have an aural dimension, bar the sound of bricks being ground to dust.

However, despite Holinshed’s evocative description, it was not only the physical statements of Becket’s sanctity that were damaged during the Reformation, as the music that had been composed to honour him was also systematically destroyed. Some of this music was strikingly recent. The surviving bass part of a mostly lost motet entitled Gaude pastore makes the central role of Becket in early sixteenth-century English devotional life obvious.Footnote 4 As a motet, Gaude pastore was probably intended for performance commemorating the Becket Jubilee in 1520, and did not have a part to play as music for public ritual worship. That honour remained with the official liturgy, the most famous of which were St Thomas’ offices for the passion (29 December) and translation (7 July), but the motet attests to an interest in composing devotional songs in St Thomas’ honour.Footnote 5 Indeed, there were a large number of non-Office St Thomas songs, covering such diverse genres as motets, conductuses, and carols that had been composed over the centuries, of which only a small fraction survive.Footnote 6 The survivors give us an insight into the cultural importance St Thomas held between the twelfth and early sixteenth century, and of how his sanctity was conceptualised; he was seen as a noted martyr, a confessor, and as England’s patron.

Yet Becket’s paramount cultural position was not to last forever. Although reformer James Bainham was burnt at the stake partly for daring to question Becket’s saintly status in 1532, by the late 1530s the mood had turned decisively against St Thomas.Footnote 7 As part of the fallout of annulment proceedings against his wife, King Henry VIII (1491-1547) broke with the pope and in some regards aligned himself with the reforming movement that had been sweeping the continent ever since Martin Luther had supposedly nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Alongside a general questioning of the role of saints in Christian worship, Henry objected to the way Thomas Becket — an archbishop who had been murdered due to his opposition to reforms made to ecclesiastical courts by Henry II (1133-1189) — had come to be venerated as a saint, viewing him instead as a traitor. This was a dramatic change from Henry’s earlier stance on St Thomas: around 1520, he likely commissioned a surgical instrument complete with an image of the saint which attests to his orthodox piety in this regard.Footnote 8 (Read more.)