Tea at Trianon: The Marriage of King James IV and Margaret Tudor, 1503

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 26, 2023

The Marriage of King James IV and Margaret Tudor, 1503

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

The marriage was a return to the policy pursued, without success, by the bridegroom’s father King James III of peace secured by a royal marriage with England. For all its promise this marriage was to end a decade later when the King was killed, along with so many of his nobility at the battle of Flodden when he invaded England as an ally of France.

Nonetheless the marriage did lead a century afterwards in 1603 to the Union of the Crowns in the person of King James VI, who was descended twice over from Queen Margaret through his paternal grandmother the Countess of Lennox. From the personal Union there flowed the parliamentary Union of 1707.

To mark the anniversary the Royal Collection Trust had an online lecture about the wedding by Dr Lucy Dean, which I booked into. This was extremely interesting and showed how the extensive surviving records can be correlated about the clothes made for the couple, the repairs to the King’s crown and sceptre and the preparation- just to be prepared - for the King’s tomb at Cambuskenneth. (Read more.)