Tea at Trianon: The Life of James Cumberlidge

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, October 21, 2024

The Life of James Cumberlidge

The reality of 18th and 19th-century race relations was far from the fantasy of Bridgerton. From ArtNet:

The 1739 family portrait was recently included in “Picturing Childhood,” an exhibition at the historic Chatsworth House in England. It depicts the prominent British architect Lord Burlington with his wife Dorothy, the countess, and their two daughters, Dorothy and Charlotte. Their names are written on a piece of paper on the floor in the painting.

Absent from this list is the identity of the third child in the painting, who stands to the far-right behind the countess’s chair. The boy carries a bundle of paintbrushes to pass her, having already provided the palette she holds in her left hand, marking her out as a keen amateur painter.

In 2004, the boy was wrongly identified by historian Richard Hewlings as James Cambridge because his name had been mistranscribed in a tailor’s bill from 1739 detailing clothes ordered by Countess of Burlington for her liveried servants, including James Cambridge “the black.” (Read more.)