Tea at Trianon: In the Heart of Hampstead

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

Friday, April 4, 2025

In the Heart of Hampstead

From Country Life:

Oh, for a crystal ball. It would have helped to see the future in 1993, when Grade II-listed Cloth Hill, on The Mount in Hampstead, came to the market. By the end of October, it had been sold by Savills for ‘slightly less than the asking price of £1 million,’ as Country Life reported at the time.
Now, it is for sale — with Savills again, and also this time Marcus Parfitt — at a rather more robust £18 million. And no, the price rise isn't all down to inflation: £1 million from 1993 would be little more than £2.1 million in today’s money. This house has outpaced inflation nine-fold. Stratospheric rises aside, there is much to commend this Queen Anne house, thought to be the second oldest surviving in Hampstead — not least its history. Cloth Hill owes its name to Tudor laundry: some say the spot was where the Court launderers did their washing, others that, there, ‘the virgin heath was white with drying linen’. Much later in the same century, George Romney, his health declining fast, sought Hampstead’s fresh air. Having moved in 1796, he just about managed to knock down Cloth Hill’s stables and coach house to build himself a new home (with painting room and gallery), when he became so ill that he decided to head back to Cumbria and his wife — whom he had otherwise neglected for more than 30 years. Cloth Hill passed into the hands of Thomas Rundell, most likely a scion of the goldsmith dynasty. When living there, his wife, Maria, published the culinary bestseller of the time, A New System of Domestic Cookery. (Read more.)