Tea at Trianon: ‘Lost’ Royal Art Collections of Charles I and Charles 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, March 6, 2023

‘Lost’ Royal Art Collections of Charles I and Charles II

From Country Living:

Between the restoration of the monarchy on May 1, 1660, and Charles II’s return three weeks later, frantic efforts were made to get the royal palaces into order to receive him. Only Whitehall and Hampton Court, the residences used by Oliver Cromwell, were fit for the new Court, but even they needed refurnishing. When a Dutch visitor, Lodewijk Huygens, was shown the former King’s apartments at Hampton Court, he was struck by the air of desolation: ‘The furniture had all been removed, except for the tapestries which had been behind the good ones to protect them from the damp of the walls.’

Almost nothing was left, because Charles I’s possessions, including one of the greatest art collections in Europe, had been sold during the Commonwealth. Parliament moved quickly to put history into reverse. On May 9, the House of Lords appointed a Committee for the Recovery of the King’s Goods, which issued an order that ‘All persons that have any of the King’s goods, jewels, or pictures’ had to return them within seven days. The proclamation was backed up by powers of search and seizure and, from August, by the offer of rewards for information about goods ‘wilfully concealed’.

Within days, queues were forming at the office in Whitehall appointed for the purpose and, by the middle of June 1661, more than 1,000 paintings had been returned or seized. No compensation was paid, as the sale of the King’s goods was exempted from the 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which declared a general amnesty for acts committed during the Commonwealth. (Read more.)