Tea at Trianon: Tudor Sunset

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, July 6, 2024

Tudor Sunset

A book review by Stephanie Mann:

This book begins and ends with death: the future Saint John Rigby is hanged, drawn, and quartered at St. Thomas Waterings (on the way to Canterbury) on June 21, 1600 and Queen Elizabeth I dies in her bed on March 24, 1603. With a title like Tudor Sunset, I don't think I'm spoiling the plot by telling you that: the sun sets on the Tudor dynasty when she dies.
It's what Josephine Ward does between these two deaths that make a novel a tense and suspenseful historical tale, as the fictional couple at the center of tale, Margaret (Meg) Scrope and Captain Richard Whitlock do their best to survive the last two years and three months of Elizabeth's reign. Especially since Meg is a recusant Catholic lady-in-waiting and friend of Anne (Dacre) Howard, Lady Arundell, the widow of martyred-in-chains Saint Philip Howard, and she and Whitlock frequent the bookstore of future Blessed James Duckett (also a martyr).
Each book and each chapter--numbered, not titled--brings another brush with danger, near escape, temptation or trap, and the reader becomes even more watchful than the characters.
Following a classic historical fiction method, Ward brings real historical characters into the story: not just Queen Elizabeth I, but Richard Topcliffe, William Byrd, Father John Gerard, SJ, Lady Arundell, the two martyrs already mentioned, etc., and one lady in particular, Luisa de Carvajal.

In the appendix with notes on her sources, Ward admits that she has brought Luisa de Carvajal to England earlier than records indicate she actually came. She needs her there for a crucial plot development and resolution.

This may be a deal breaker for some readers and I'm not completely happy with her decision either. One result of this change in time line is that Ward depicts the "last supper" of Saint John Roberts, OSB and Blessed Thomas Somers the night before their executions at Tyburn arranged by Luisa de Carvajal on December 9, 1610 in Newgate Prison as being arranged instead for Blesseds Francis Page, SJ, Robert Watkinson, and Venerable Thomas Tichborne the night before their executions on April 20, 1602! (Read more.)