Tea at Trianon: Victoria Eugenie 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

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg

Queen Victoria's granddaughter and Queen of Spain. From Tatler:

She spent her childhood flitting between the royal residences at Balmoral, Windsor Castle, and Osborne House. Nicknamed ‘The Jubilee Baby’ because her birth coincided with the 50th year of Queen Victoria’s reign, Victoria Eugenie was a firm fixture in royal life, serving as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her cousins, the future King George V and the Duchess of York, in 1893. But it was her relationship with her grandmother that defined Ena’s upbringing. Queen Victoria adored her, with Ena later writing that the monarch was ‘like a second mother to us … very kind but very strict, with old fashioned ideas of how children must be brought up.’ For her own part, the Queen called her namesake ‘the little treasure’, writing: ‘I love these darling children so, almost as much as their own parent.’ She taught Ena some of life’s most important lessons. For one: a princess never ‘goes to bed’, she simply ‘retires’.
But it was at Buckingham Palace that the next chapter in Victoria Eugenie’s life would unfold. King Alfonso XIII of Spain was on an official visit to meet King Edward VII, and the palace was holding a banquet in his honour. The King was one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors, with much of the court assuming that he would marry Victoria Eugenie’s cousin, Princess Patricia of Connaught. She, evidently, was not particularly interested, as during the state dinner King Alfonso asked his hosts the name of the girl with the almost white hair. Despite sitting between Queen Alexandra and Princess Helena, the King of Spain had been taken by Victoria Eugenie – and her platinum blonde tresses. (Read more.)