Tea at Trianon: The Question of Thomas More

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, October 7, 2025

The Question of Thomas More

From The Acton Institute:

The book opens with a description of a citywide Candlemas procession in 1478 in London. “When seen from above,” she writes, “the thousands of small flickering flames, as they met and merged through the streets of London, might appear as a single unwavering light.” Add in the chapter’s epigraph from More’s Four Last Things—“For as the flame is next to the smoke, so is death next to an incurable sickness, and such is all our life”—and the book immediately has the atmosphere of 15th-century London. I was impressed by this imagery from the outset, but when the book unostentatiously returned to the symbol of a candle flame at the end, this opening took on new meaning. Paul is not simply a historian; she is also a storyteller.

The book is pleasingly arranged, moving easily from detailed descriptions of More’s daily life to deep dives into cultural and political intricacies. Paul consistently makes good choices about how to organize her material. For example, early in the book she moves from a description of More’s young childhood days (before he started grammar school) into an account of the chaotic time after King Edward IV’s death. She closes the section about Thomas’s childhood with the sentence, “While Thomas slept next to his siblings, the rest of the city was meant to join him, but much business could occur in the darkness of the London streets.” The next section begins, “Dodging the night watch, William Mistlebrook rushed through the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate…” This is simply a good transition, and a smart way to embed the details of her subject’s life in its historical setting.

Individual sentences themselves, however, leave something to be desired: “the rest of the city was meant to join him” is an unpleasant construction. There are a number of moments like this where a small syntactical flaw interrupts the flow of the story, which made me wish Paul’s editor had been more rigorous.

Paul’s facility with her material is clear from her apparent delight in interweaving quotations, historical records, and her own descriptive prose. Though the biography is about St. Thomas More, it also gives detailed portraits of characters like John More (Thomas’s father), Margaret (More) Gibbs (his daughter), Erasmus, Germain de Brie, Edward IV, Cardinal Wolsey, Francis I of France, and scores of others. (Read more.)