Tea at Trianon: Rosary of Marie-Antoinette

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, August 10, 2024

Rosary of Marie-Antoinette

From NCR:

Marie Antoinette had given the rosary to an Irish missionary priest, Father Henry Essex Edgeworth, otherwise known as Abbé Edgeworth, who was then chaplain to her husband, King Louis XVI. When the king was guillotined in January 1793, Abbé Edgeworth fled to England for safety and took refuge at the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Abbé Edgeworth eventually returned to France to continue his missionary work and left the rosary with the Shrewsbury family. It was then handed down through the generations, eventually ending up with Mary Fortescue-Turville, a previous owner of Bosworth Hall who died at the property in 1906. The rosary, one of several Marie Antoinette is thought to have given away, was then kept at the hall and has remained there ever since. (Read more.)