Tea at Trianon: A Brief History of Country-house Sleeping Etiquette

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, August 12, 2025

A Brief History of Country-house Sleeping Etiquette

Lord and Lady Grantham were the exception not the rule. From Country Life:

There is a long-standing tradition among Britain’s aristocracy for couples, even married, to sleep apart. As Lady Pamela Hicks, cousin of the late Duke of Edinburgh and former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth II, told biographer Sally Bedell Smith in Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch: ‘In England, the upper classes always have had separate bedrooms. You don’t want to be bothered with snoring or someone flinging a leg around. When you are feeling cosy, you share your room… It is lovely to be able to choose.’
Far from being a sign of distance or dysfunction, sleeping separately was — and still is, in some circles — a mark of elegance, practicality and personal comfort. Not only that, notes Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, it may actually help sustain marriages. ‘I am quite sure their decision to have their own bedrooms and, occasionally, to share them, is one of the main reasons why divorce is kept to a minimum in really aristocratic circles,’ he notes. (Read more.)