Tea at Trianon: Knole

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

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Knole

From House and Garden:

The Sackville family has lived at Knole, one of Britain’s great treasure houses, for more than four hundred years. Throughout its history, Knole has lured generations of heirs with the promise of an ancestral place, an aristocratic life, a sense of unearned esteem and belonging. Many of these Sackvilles have revelled in the opportunity. But others, once seduced, have found such a huge inheritance hard to manage. The place has ground them down, becoming a curse, a burden, rather than a privilege or a glory. I am the thirteenth generation to live here, and—after this personal tour of the “calendar house” with its legendary 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, and seven courtyards, which sprawl over four acres—I invite you to form your own opinion of our challenge.

Knole has always excited a range of different reactions, and not just among members of the Sackville family. It’s a love-it-or-loathe-it sort of place. King Henry VIII liked it so much that he forced Thomas Cranmer, his Archbishop of Canterbury, to hand it to him in 1538. And yet, in the following century, the diarist John Evelyn was so depressed by the greyness of this “greate old fashion’d house” that he scuttled out into the sunshine. Knole was built and then furnished to impress, and it has been a show house ever since Thomas Sackville acquired it in 1604 (the year after James I, the first Stuart monarch, ascended to the throne). It is precisely this that can make it so impenetrable, such a difficult place to understand. Some people are put off by its sheer size. (Read more.)