Tea at Trianon: Britain’s Forgotten European Empire

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, July 24, 2023

Britain’s Forgotten European Empire

From UnHerd:

When King Charles ascended the throne to the sonorous chants of a Greek Orthodox choir, the compelling fusion of British and Byzantine ceremony struck onlookers as a strange and mysterious novelty. But in one sense, it was the natural result of a now-disregarded byway of British imperial history. For half a century, British rule in the Ionian Islands off Greece’s western coast created an appealing hybrid society with all the romantic unlikeliness of a Crusader kingdom. On holy days, red-jacketed British soldiers would escort Corfu’s mummified patron saint through the streets in clouds of incense, with the garrison’s senior commanders bearing the ceremony’s giant candles. So impressed were locals by the spectacle that, even today, the island’s village marching bands play Holy Week’s funeral dirges in colourful uniforms and glittering helmets copied from the long-dead British garrison.

Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire. (Read more.)