Tea at Trianon: John Winant and Sarah Churchill

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, June 26, 2023

John Winant and Sarah Churchill

From New England Historical Society:

He was a liberal Republican who supported the New Deal. He stumped throughout New Hampshire at church dinners and Grange halls on behalf of the “Townsend Plan,” which became Social Security. In 1941, President Roosevelt appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom to replace Joseph P. Kennedy, who wanted to appease Hitler rather than fight.

Roosevelt called the idealistic Winant ‘Utopian John.’ He was rich, handsome, likable, gentle, dreamy — and doomed by his hopeless love affair with Sarah Churchill. In London John Winant fell under the spell of Winston Churchill and his family. He worked tirelessly with the prime minister to support Britain during the war. When news of Pearl Harbor broke, Winant and Churchill danced around the room together, excited by the inevitable entry of the United States into the conflict. He visited Churchill nearly every weekend at his Chequers country estate. Winant was fond of all the Churchills, and they of him. Sarah Churchill visited Chequers every weekend, too, drawn to her powerful father and the great events unfolding around him. (Read more.)