Tea at Trianon: The Catholic World of Alice Meynell

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

Monday, October 20, 2025

The Catholic World of Alice Meynell

From The Catholic Herald:

Alice Meynell was born in 1847, the daughter of painter and pianist Christiana Thompson. The family were devout Anglicans until Alice began to read Newman and, aged 21, converted to Catholicism. Soon her entire family followed.
Meynell was already a recognised literary talent: when she described the interior change of conversion she inverted the usual image of the Church calling her soul. Instead, she wrote that it was "I who received the Church so that whatever she could unfold with time she would unfold it there where I had enclosed her, in my heart."
In 1876, Alice married writer, publisher and convert Wilfrid Meynell. The couple settled in Bayswater where they had eight children, edited and printed numerous periodicals (Merry England, The Pen, Weekly Register), and opened their house to writers both Catholic and non-Catholic: Francis Thompson, DH Lawrence, Aubrey de Vere, Coventry Patmore, George Meredith, GK Chesterton and Harriet Munroe.
They gathered to read aloud, edit each other's work, argue about style. Among them sat artists John Singer Sargeant, Sherril Schell and early photographers Walter Ernest Stoneman and EO Hoppé – all busy capturing portraits in order to record their historical moment, the fierce re-emergence of a British Catholic literary world after centuries of suppression.
Meynell herself was a celebrated poet (collections included The Flower of the Mind and A Father of Women). She also wrote volumes of short, elegant essays (The Spirit of Place, London Impressions, Hearts of Controversy) on topics both literary and common to daily life: rain, composure, solitude.
The essays widely read at the time emerged from Meynell's experience of foreign travel, her analysis of Greek myth, her observations of nature; they directed a lightly philosophical eye to the ordinary and particular. The essays are rarely bitter or argumentative, except for one, written after Guy Fawkes Day, in which she criticises the angry carnival of British idolatry: "mockery is the only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity the only intelligence". (Read more.)