Tea at Trianon: Asthall Manor

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

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Asthall Manor

Nancy Mitford's girlhood home. From Country Life:

Asthall Manor near Burford epitomises the genre of Cotswolds architecture that for more than a century has been celebrated in the pages of Country Life.
Several decades before the magazine was founded in 1897, William Morris drew attention to the ‘quiet poetry’ of Cotswolds buildings when he fell under the spell of Kelmscott Manor, and Country Life’s former architectural writer Christopher Hussey wrote in 1934: ‘The architecture of the oolite ridge that runs from Lyme Regis to Stamford is a kind of domestic Touraine, the backbone of traditional English building.’
[...]
The Jacobean manor house has another, overriding claim to fame. It was here, from 1919 until 1926, that the Mitford family spent seven core years of their famous childhood, and Asthall was one of the houses that inspired Alconleigh in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. So pervasive is our fascination with the Mitfords that a new production, The Party Girls, which claims to tell 'the sensation story of the sisters', opened this week at Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. Last month, the cast were spotted exploring Asthall.
The girls' father, the 2nd Lord Redesdale — the legendery ‘Farve’, immortalised as Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s autobiographical novels — had inherited Batsford Park near Cirencester in 1916, together with 36,000 acres, including lands around Swinbrook that had originally formed part of the manor of Asthall. Unable to afford its upkeep, he sold the rambling Victorian pile two years later and bought Asthall Manor, situated conveniently close to his farms and surrounded by rolling hills, copses and a trout stream, where he could indulge his principal interest of field sports.
But the house, he believed, was haunted by a poltergeist, and this was allegedly one of the reasons why he set about rebuilding Swinbrook House. This clunky edifice on a nearby hill became their home in 1926, and was remembered fondly only by Deborah, the youngest Mitford sister, who was only six when they moved. (Read more.)