Tea at Trianon: Princess Alice of Battenberg

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

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Princess Alice of Battenberg

From Tatler:

A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Philip’s mother was born as Princess Alice of Battenberg at Windsor Castle in 1985, and was born congenitally deaf. She met her husband, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1902 at the coronation of King Edward VII, with the two marrying a year later. The couple went on to have five children, four daughters and one son, Philip, and remained in Greece until the exile of the Royal Family in 1917. Then, they settled briefly in Paris, before Philip was sent to live in England and his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, being committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930. (Read more.)