Tea at Trianon: Highlights of St James's Palace

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 19, 2025

Highlights of St James's Palace

The Tapestry Room at St James's Palace.

From the Royal Trust Collection:

Originally known as the ‘Consort’s Presence Chamber’, the Tapestry Room features a spectacular original fireplace that survives from the reign of Henry VIII. In one of the carved quatrefoils (a design made of four intersecting lobes) you can see the initials ‘H’ and ‘A’ for Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, which are intertwined with a true lover’s knot.
This room is best-known for its display of tapestries that tell the story of Vulcan and Venus from Homer’s Odyssey. Charles I, when Prince of Wales, commissioned a suite of nine tapestries from the Mortlake tapestry workshop, the designs for which may have been adapted from an earlier series owned by Henry VIII on the same subject. Following Charles's execution in 1649, most of his collection of art (including the tapestries) was sold, and the suite was dispersed across Europe along with countless other works. (Read more.)